Yeah, I saw the Nissan Sentra. Nissan is a great company. They have came out with really nice cars lately and the way they turned things around for themselves after returning from the brink of bankruptcy is nothing less than amazing. That is very true that Sentra is more powerful than the Corolla, but I have family members living in North Carolina and they have an 2000 Altima. Most of the issues with the car have been about reliability. My brother-in-law is not too fond of the car since the distributor went out at 16K miles. Besides, comparing Sentra to Corolla I could see the Corolla Sport styling as very aggressive and eye catching. I was a bit iffy about the back of Sentra etc. It is purely a matter of choice here. Corolla has a great gas mileage. I can get about 700 KM in a 50 litre gas tank (works out to about 38 miles per US gallon with auto trans.) so my decision to go with a Corolla was that it had a bit of everything. The Corolla engine although not as fast as the Sentra, yet is so efficient that 0-60 mph tests done by Car and Driver magazine showed that 150 HP Sunfire and
150 HP Cavalier could not compare to the performance of the 130 HP primarily because of Corolla's better torque.Then again, I totally agree with you that Sentra has some good points and it really depends on where your priorities are.