What MPG Does the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2 Diesel Get in Real-World Driving?

Look, I get it: Nobody buys a huge full-size half-ton pickup truck, especially one in a specialized off-road trim like the ZR2, with any real consideration for fuel economy. The new 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2 is an amazingly capable off-road pickup. I most recently drove one off-road through the California desert near Palm Springs and was floored by its combination of comfort, agility and go-anywhere abilities. And it comes with an optional diesel engine: a turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six-cylinder Duramax engine that is an absolute marvel of smoothness, torque and everyday usability.

The Silverado ZR2 is a monster in the dirt, can crawl over towering obstacles and blasts across desert scrub with ease — but what do you do with it when Chevy drops one off in your suburban driveway for a week? Doing donuts on the local park’s baseball diamonds is irresponsible and antisocial (and illegal), so why not test the truck for how it might be used the 99% of its life that it’s not trail crawling? That’s what I did, taking it on a 200-mile fuel-economy loop to see how the latest diesel-equipped off-road Silverado ZR2 handles commuter and highway duty.

Related: Driving the 2024 Chevrolet ZR2 Off-Road Pickup Family: 1 Hot Dog, 3 Sizes

The Ride

The Silverado ZR2 was a new trim level for the 2022 model year, bringing a lot of the advanced off-road parts from the Colorado ZR2 up into the full-size pickup category. This means it features the Multimatic Dynamic Suspensions Spool Valve dampers and unique springs first seen on the mid-size Colorado and meant for higher-speed off-road runs, increased suspension travel, a lifted body, special Terrain Mode driving mode calibration, a steel front bumper with a 33.5-degree approach angle, 18-inch wheels with 33-inch off-road mud-terrain tires, front and rear electronic locking differentials, and a host of cosmetic alterations meant to emphasize its rugged nature.

The news for 2024 is that the ZR2 can now be had with the turbo-diesel 3.0-liter Duramax six-cylinder engine. It’s one hell of a powerhouse, making 305 horsepower but 495 pounds-feet of torque and mated to a 10-speed automatic transmission with selectable part-time four-wheel drive. That’s not as much horsepower as the 420-hp, 6.2-liter V-8 — the other engine you can get in the ZR2 — but the diesel bests it on torque by 35 pounds-feet. The bigger difference shows up in the official EPA fuel-economy ratings: The 6.2-liter V-8 gets a predictably awful 14/17/15 mpg city/highway/combined, but those numbers bump up a lot when you opt for the diesel and its 20/22/21 mpg rating. That’s a whopping 40% improvement in combined fuel economy, making the diesel almost a no-brainer selection, especially when you consider that Chevy is offering it up as the standard powertrain. That’s right: The Silverado 1500 ZR2 now starts with the diesel engine — the 6.2-liter V-8 is a $1,695 option.

So the question becomes: Can the Silverado 1500 ZR2 with the Duramax actually deliver on its EPA ratings, or are those just the product of ideal testing conditions? Will real-world fuel economy differ significantly? There was only one way to find out.

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The Route

For testing fuel economy, I run a roughly 200-mile loop that includes about one-fourth stop-and-go suburban traffic at speeds below 50 mph and three-fourths steady-state highway driving at posted speed limits of 70-75 mph. Cruise control is used on highway driving, as many owners would do, and climate control is set to a comfortable 70 degrees, also as most owners would do. The windows remain up and the tires are properly inflated to the manufacturer’s recommended pressures. My driving style in these tests is “calm”: no hard acceleration, no stomping on the brakes (unless required), just go with the flow of traffic and see how the vehicle reacts. The route starts at my home in Ann Arbor, Mich., heads east and then north via surface streets to Novi, then joins the highway for a jaunt west to Lansing, south to Jackson, then back east to the Ann Arbor area. The ambient temperature for this test was 44 degrees, winds were calm, and the skies were dry and clear.

The Results

After the first 46 miles of suburban street stop-and-go, the trip computer was telling me I’d achieved 25.8 mpg with an average speed of 38 mph, considerably better than the truck’s official 20 mpg rating. A quick reset of one of the two trip computers and the next 162 miles registered at 22.2 mpg at an average speed of 72.7 mph, pretty much matching the 22 mpg the EPA says the truck should achieve. Overall, the 207.5-mile loop saw the truck return a vehicle-calculated 22.9 mpg at an average speed of 58 mph, better than the rating of 21 mpg. But then I refilled the tank with 9.766 gallons of diesel fuel, and that calculates out to an average of 21.3 mpg — only slightly higher than the official EPA rating of 21 mpg combined.

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So yes, the big diesel-powered off-road 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2, with its aerodynamic-killing lift kit, knobby 33-inch Goodyear Territory M/T off-road tires, scoops, flaps and flow-through Bow-Tie-badged grille actually does achieve some right decent fuel economy out in the real world. The city number is particularly impressive, averaging nearly 26 mpg in steady around-town driving on suburban Detroit streets; that’s better fuel economy than a 2024 Volkswagen Golf GTI is rated to get in the city in a far more massive vehicle (with admittedly different capabilities).

Unless diesel fuel is ridiculously expensive or hard to come by where you are, the Duramax version of the new ‘24 Silverado 1500 ZR2 is the one to get. Spending extra for the gas engine, which makes nearly the same power and gets worse fuel economy, doesn’t make much sense — especially when the diesel is just so outstanding to drive, on-road or off.

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