The 2008 Dodge Avenger SXT is uninspiring.

I have been driving a 2008 Dodge Avenger SXT for the last week as a rental call, and have put nearly a thousand miles on it mostly on Southern California freeways. In a so many words, the car is a dog. There's nothing horribly wrong with the car, but there's almost nothing right with it either.

The SXT model has a four cylinder 2.4 liter engine and a four speed automatic transmission. The car has sluggish acceleration, it's noisy, and the steering feels skittish. It has a tendency to oversteer when making minor course corrections, and when you punch the engine to try to accelerate, there's just nothing there. The transmission downshifts, and the engine winds up, but the engine knocks slightly, and just barely gets you moving faster.

The interior of the car is a disappointment too. The first impression is plastic; hard, cheap looking plastic. The dashboard is a huge deep expanse of plastic, and if they call it a padded dash, it's a joke. The glove box door is thin and plastic. The trim around the shift lever is thin and rattles, and doors and dash are covered in a hard plastic pattern that looks like a file or rasp. The one "cool" addition to the dashboard is a small air conditioned compartment that can be used to store about four cans of pop for the road.

I'm 6'4" and fortunately, there's enough headroom, but the leg room is cramped. In particular, the console (also hard plastic, what else?) hits me in the right knee, and the huge plastic arm rest on the door further confines your left leg and knee. The driver's seat is controlled electrically, but the arm rest protrudes into my leg so much that it's difficult to operate the switches with the door closed. There's also a tilt steering wheel, but it doesn't rise high enough for me. I could see the speedometer fully, but the tachometer and gas guage are partially obscured by the steering wheel.

The back seat's nothing to write home about either. With driver's seat in the full back position, the back seat is very cramped, and the seating position is uncomforable. The rear doors have large partitions toward the rear of door so that it's difficult for the back seat passengers to look directly out of their windows. The partition also increases the size of the blind spot for the driver.

When I compared the Avenger to my similarly priced 2005 Toyota Camry, the Camry win hands down in every department except the dashboard canned pop cooler.