Video: The 2024 Chevrolet ZR2 Off-Road Pickup Truck Family: Review

Chevrolet seems to have taken that idea to a new level with their ZR2 family of off-road pickup trucks, now available in medium, in terms of the Colorado ZR2, large in the Silverado 1500 ZR2 and extra large, in the new 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 2,500 HD ZR2. Well, we've come here to Palm Springs, California, to drive all three of these trucks, to see which ones we'd best like to take out into the desert and maybe at the end of the day, which one we'd like to take home. (graphics whirring) So what exactly makes a ZR2? Well, that is the top off-road trim level for Chevrolet's pickup trucks and there's a number of common styling elements among all of these trucks. First and foremost is this grill. It's a ZR2 family grill, that includes what they call the Chevrolet Flowtie Badge. Air actually flows through the badge and helps with engine cooling. Now this model is called a Bison Edition. It's the top ZR2 trim level and it includes a number of different components, that are made by a company called AEV, that are specifically for overlanding and making things a little bit more durable on the trail, specifically these bumpers, stamp steel, front and rear, made by AEV and they improve the approach and departure angle for the Bison Edition vehicles. You've also got some steel skid plates underneath instead of aluminum, but down the side, you've got 35 inch Goodyear Territory tires, riding black painted AEV wheels. Now these are serious, mud terrain, off-road tires. These will help you in the dirt, in the mud, on rocks, they do really well and they are super large. They're the largest tires ever fitted to an off-road pickup from Chevrolet. There are a couple of components that are common among all ZR2 models. Every ZR2 truck gets a lift kit to varying degrees, depending on which truck you're talking about and they also get these, multimatic DSSV spool valve shock absorbers, front and rear. Now these are fantastic off-road shocks. They help this thing go really quickly across really rough terrain, dry wash beds, washboard roads, things like that, without beating everybody up in the cabin. And when you're talking about a Bison Edition specifically, you also get additional jounce control dampers, which smooth things out even more. It is really extraordinary how well this thing works. Also, when you're talking about a Bison Edition, you get that. They have a full-sized spare tire mounted in the bed. Now how they used to do it, is they used to mount it flat in the bed on this kind of platform, but then you couldn't use your bed. Now they have it mounted vertically, hard up against the back of the cab, which is great, because now you've got plenty of room, you can actually use your pickup truck as a pickup truck, but you can't actually see out the back of the pickup truck, because there's a big full size spare tire in the way. What they don't have in this vehicle is General Motor's rear camera mirror, which would be perfect in this thing. I really don't understand why they don't have it here. If there was ever a use case for that rear camera mirror, this is it! All of that sounds really great on paper, but at the end of the day, it really just matters how the thing drives. So how does it drive? Let's go find out. (door thudding) The lineup starts with this one. This is the Chevrolet Colorado, which is the mid-size truck, the powertrain, you pretty much only have one choice, that is a 2.7 liter turbocharged 4 cylinder engine. Here it makes 310 horsepower and 430 pounds, feet of torque, which is pretty monstrous for a small Turbocharged four cylinder. And it actually kind of needs all of this power, especially in the Bison Spec. The tires are 35s. 35 inch off-road Goodyear Territory, MT tires, which actually do feel, as you're driving along, they're a little bit bouncy, they're a little bit balloon-ey, but they're not loud, which is actually kind of interesting. You don't get a whole lot of vibration, you don't get a whole lot of noise from these things. They're a really good balance of mud terrain tires, which are specifically chunky and blocky and made to go off into the dirt and crawl over rocks really well and on-road comfort. So I mean, you're not getting a whole lot of drone or noise like you would with a number of specialty off-road tires and in this model in particular, it's really quite civilized, quite smooth. You do feel the extra size of the tires when you're climbing a hill or accelerating. You really do have to put your foot into it a little bit more in order to maintain speed or even accelerate in some instances. So yeah, big tires, they make a good difference off road, but they will affect how the vehicle drives and handles on road as well. The handling characteristics of the ZR2 on pavement are perfectly civilized. You could drive this thing every day, which was kind of what Chevrolet's goal is for the ZR2s. They're meant to be everyday, daily driver trucks that you can then go off and have fun with in the desert or on the trails on the weekends and on vacations and so you can still commute in this thing. I don't know that you'd necessarily want to, given fuel economy might take a bit of a hit given the equipment on here, but you could. And the nice thing about this Colorado, is that it'll fit in your garage probably, unlike the the larger trucks, like the Silverado light duty and heavy duty, this thing is more urban sized. You can drive this in the city and do so quite successfully. You can park it in supermarket parking lots and not have to do like six point turns to get in and out of the parking spaces. So the benefits of something smaller like this are real. Chevrolet has also tuned this thing to be a little bit different in terms of character, from the larger 1500 light duty and 2,500 heavy duty versions of the Silverado. This is meant to be more sprightly, more sporty, more toss-able if you will. And as we've seen, in driving the ZR2 non-Bison version off-road, actually, it does do that really quite well, it's very toss-able, it's a lot of fun, it feels very nimble. There are running boards on the ZR2s and the Bisons, but they're more rock rails than running boards. They're tucked up against the actual frame of the vehicle and they're meant to protect the frame, more than they're meant to help you get in and out of the truck. From an interior standpoint, in the Colorado ZR2, you've got a lot of the same changes and upgrades that you get across the lineup, the others ZR2s, you've got special upholstery, you've got rubber floor mats and wipe clean surfaces in here. You've got the gray upholstery with the yellow stitching in the dash and on the seats and it looks really good, it feels really nice too. Now for Colorado, the same issues that I had with other versions of the Colorado still persist here and that there's a lot of hard plastic everywhere. Yeah, some of it's covered in really nice upholstery and it looks dynamite, but when you start touching things is when you start realizing, "Well, it is still a lot of hard plastic." But again, this is a mid-sized pickup truck. What's especially nice, is that you still have a lot of dedicated hard button controls here. It's not all touchscreen stuff. You do have a large touchscreen here, which is running their latest Google operating system. But again, you've got dedicated buttons for things, like the locking differentials in the ZR2, lane keep, it says, "Lane monitoring," things like that, all of that still has dedicated buttons, which is frankly quite nice, especially for climate control. I really hate having to fumble with touchscreen climate controls. In the Chevy trucks, you don't have to do that. Off-road is of course where the ZR2s are supposed to be and where they play best. This Bison Edition has extra special suspension bits, it's got those jounce control dampers, which is really meant to help you go higher speed, over desert wash kind of conditions. It doesn't exactly have the same kind of smoothness at higher speed that you'd get in say something, with a Raptor badge, but it does work very well. The benefit of a Colorado sized vehicle, is that you can fit it through a lot of these obstacles a lot more easily than you would a full-size pickup or a heavy duty pickup. That's really why they've made this kind of thing, is that it does fit through trails, it does fit through obstacles and you're not worried about getting errors on the pinstripes down the sides of your very expensive off-road pickup truck. And you really do see the benefit of these 35 inch tires when you're crawling over a lot of these rocky obstacles out here as well. These things have plenty of grip, you've got tons of ground clearance. The articulation on the Colorado ZR2 Bison is really quite impressive. Yeah, you'll hear some occasional bangs and booms underneath, but you've got steel skid plates under there, so really not a whole lot to worry about. The ZR2, and the Bison in particular, helps you go off road, really rather well, from a lot of the different systems that it has as well. You've got your four wheel drive selector down here, obviously automatic for driving things like on road, two wheel drive if you wanna try and save some gas, four high, four low, there's a transfer case for that. When you spin this dial, you get different modes, like the normal mode it comes in, but then there's off-road mode, tow/haul, terrain mode. Terrain mode specifically is very interesting, because it turns it into a one pedal operation. It's automatically going to break and slow the vehicle as you're driving when you lift off the throttle. Now maybe you want that, maybe you don't. It is helpful for things like a steep descent down a hill, it does help you maintain a greater degree of control and you don't have to hit the brakes, which is also nice. Baja mode is very interesting, because it changes a lot of the parameters of the vehicle in order to make it a better high speed off-road-er as well, going over things like desert wash and dry river beds, dry lake beds, it's a whole lot of fun. But maybe you need something bigger than the Colorado? No, not this thing, this thing's way bigger than the Colorado. We'll get to this. I'm talking about the Chevrolet Silverado 1500, light duty ZR2 and ZR2 Bison. Now we didn't get an opportunity to drive the 1500 bison, that isn't at this event, but we did get some seat time in the regular Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2 and here's what we think of that one. This is basically the middle sister of the ZR2 family. This is the Silverado 1500 ZR2, also available in a Bison version, but that's not the one we're driving on this trip, this is just the regular ZR2, and it's got all the same stuff that the other ZR2s have. It has the multimatic DSSV shocks, the off-road suspension, a bunch of underside skid plate protection for the front end, for the transfer case, for a bunch of other parts underneath. It's also got the Goodyear Territory off-road mud terrain tires. The interesting thing for the 2024 model here, is that you can now get the three liter turbo diesel six cylinder engine in the ZR2, before you could only get the 6.2 liter V8 gasoline version. The 6.2 liter makes 420 horsepower and 460 pounds, feet of torque. The three liter turbo diesel, which is the one we're driving right now, makes only 305 horsepower, but 495 pounds, feet of torque. That is just an amazing amount, a monster engine basically, but it's also really quite efficient, very smooth and it does present a little bit of an interesting competitive advantage over say Ford or Ram, which no longer offer diesel engines in their full size pickups anymore. The fact that you can now get this diesel in the off-road ZR2 spec is actually really cool, because a lot of people like doing off-road stuff with diesels. The instant torque that they have down low really does make a difference when you're doing kinds of rock climbing. But on road like this, it's also really a fantastic engine. It's smooth, it's remarkably quiet for a diesel, you don't even realize that it is a diesel until really it's time to go fill it up or when you really put your foot down and you hear, the slightly different tone than a V8 would make or when you're sitting at a stoplight and you have the windows down and then yeah, it sounds like a tractor. But overall frankly, the three liter turbo diesel in this 1500 ZR2 is really the powertrain that I prefer, over that big gasoline V8. One thing that's nice about a full size pickup, as opposed to the Colorado, is that you've got a lot more space in here. You've got more headroom, you've got more width. For a bigger guy like me, this is really quite comfortable. The seats themselves also excellently comfortable and the ZR2 spec, you do actually get quite a lot for your money. This one has the technology package, so it's got a lot of additional features as well. But you've also got things in here like heated and cooled front seats, which is really nice when it's 100 degrees out. Oh my God! what am I doing here? I don't belong here. But where the Silverado 1500 ZR2 really shines is in the dirt. This is where you start to feel all of those bits and pieces start coming together. You've got those DSSV shocks, the off-road suspension, you can hear things pinging off the skid plates underneath. It just works really well. Now this is not the same level of Raptor ability that you'd get with Ford, but it really doesn't need to be and it's also not as expensive as a Raptor either. You've got these Goodyear Territory tires and they work really well. They are mud terrain tires, not all terrain tires, so they have a lot of grip, especially in like loose sand like this. (engine reverberating) Oh yeah, it works really, really well and the thing is, it doesn't beat you up either. It's gotta be one of the more comfortable off-road trucks that I've ever sampled out in the dirt. How about a nice big obstacle like this one? There we go! Up and over, no problem whatsoever. No lack of grip, even with these loose surfaces like this, gravel, sand, not a problem. It'd be a lot of fun in the mud too, but well this is the desert, we don't have any mud just now. It's not burning man, is it? (Aaron laughing) But even at higher speeds over washboard surfaces like this, it's smooth, it's easy to control, it's comfortable and that's not something you can say about all off-road trucks. Now part of it is the Silverado 1500s size. You've got a long wheel base, you've got a wide track. It really does help in absorbing a lot of these kinds of bumps and obstacles. But I might just get through this entire course, without bruising any kidneys or bursting a vertebra, which is, you know, again, something that you can't say about maybe a Jeep Gladiator and it's fun too! You don't have a whole lot of feedback in the steering and that's partly due to the big ballooning off-road tires. But you know what? You never feel like you're not in control or having any kind of issues with that. It's just smooth and competent and capable and it really is a testament to how well General Motors engineers a lot of these trucks. But if the 1500 still isn't big enough for you, well, there's this! This is the extra large hot dog in the ZR2 lineup. This is a new 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 2,500 Crew Cab ZR2 Bison Edition. Yes, that's a mouthful and a lot of words and a lot of badging! But that's a lot of truck, so there's plenty of room on the thing for all of those badges. You can get all of the equipment that you get on other ZR2s on this one as well. And being the Bison Edition, you also get a lot of the AEV parts, like the stamp steel bumpers, like the 18 inch wheels with the 35 inch tires and the better underbody skid plate protection as well. Now given that this is a heavy duty truck, you can also get a massive 6.6 liter turbo diesel V8 engine and the ability to tow up to 18,500 pounds! But how does something this huge work, both on road and off-road on the road? On the road, the Chevrolet Silverado 2,500 ZR2 Bison Edition, it feels like a heavy duty truck, but with some caveats. Obviously it's an off-road truck, it has off-road tires. These are 35 inch Goodyear Territory mud terrain tires, MTs, and man, you can actually hear these pretty loudly out here on the pavement. It's fine apparently in the dirt, but out here, when you've got relatively smooth blacktop, that is your primary thing that you're hearing. It's not engine noise, it's not wind noise, it is the road noise. But they are smooth and they actually handle pretty decently as well. You don't have super sharp handling, but this is an HD truck, you're not gonna have super sharp handling. What you do have, at least in this one, is the optional 6.6 liter turbo diesel V8 Duramax engine, made it to a 10 speed Allison HD transmission. That is what you can get in most of the other Chevrolet Silverado 2,500 HDs as well and it's a fantastic engine. You've got so much torque in this thing that you're never going to want for power. The thing can tow up to 18,500 pounds and even the gasoline engine can tow I think around 16,000 pounds, So that's a significant amount, you can put a really large camper trailer back there or gooseneck or maybe off-road ATVs or loaded up on all kinds of equipment, go off into the trails, go off road, unhitch the thing, take this thing where you need to take it and you're basically having a great time off road. On road, however, like I said, it's an HD truck, it's not quiet, it's huge. Seeing around you is something of a challenge in GM's latest trucks, because the things are just so massive. You do have some fairly large blind spots. This is narrow, the windshield I should say. It's kind of looking out of a gunslick and you have a really large dash in here that's very imposing. It is however really nice in here. You've got the typical ZR2 amenities that you've got in the rest of the lineup as well. So you've got the special wipe clean upholstery, you've got the yellow stitching and the dash in doors, you've got special off-road pages and you've got special graphics as well. It looks really nice. And this being the Bison Edition, you've also got things like the embroidered headrests with the AEV Bison logo in it as well. So overall, I mean it's a really nice package, it certainly isn't cheap, but it better be nice. But again, you are reminded that trucks like this, heavy duty trucks, they're specialty items, they're not necessarily something you'd want to commute in every day. Out here where you've got tons of space, yeah, they'll probably work pretty well, back east where I'm from, where you don't quite have the same amount of room, where you really have to struggle to put one of these things in a parking lot or try and fit it into a parking garage? They're really not as as suitable for that kind of activity. But if you do need one and you know what you're getting into, an HD truck like this is fantastic. And if you need to go off road in one, well it has the equipment to do it, so let's actually see how well it goes off-road. I mean something this size? That's gotta be a challenge. Like with all of the ZR2 offerings, it does have some special off-road equipment. It has the DSSV dampers, like the 1500 and the Colorado does, but they're tuned obviously a little bit differently, because this is a considerably larger and heavier truck than either of those two, it only has a rear locking differential, doesn't have a front locking diff. So that is a little interesting (Aaron grunting) and you might be thinking that, (Aaron grunting) piloting an enormous vehicle like this off road might be a little challenging and you're right, because this thing is enormous and it's not as comfortable as you might think. It still beats you up, it kind of has to. The suspension is fairly stiff, (Aaron grunting) because that truck is so heavy. Kind of has to be, otherwise- (Aaron grunting) it would be damaging itself. So there are only two drive modes in the 2,500. You've got normal and you've got off-road. You don't have the variety of different off-road modes that you'd have, in say like the Colorado. There's no Baja mode obviously, I wouldn't want to be barreling across the desert in something this heavy, that fast. There's also no terrain mode, so there's no one pedal driving for rock crawling and things like that. But it still handles anything that you point it at, because it's just enormous and has incredible ground clearance and has a super torque-ey diesel engine. So really there's very few obstacles that you can throw this thing at, that it won't get over. The only challenge might come if you've got a narrow spot. Obviously something like a Colorado will fit through various canyons and ridges and forest trees, things like that, much, easier than something like this would, but out here in the desert, where you've got tons of open space, hey who cares? You've got tons of room, something like this works just fine. You do have things like hill descent control and these Goodyear Territory MT 35 inch tires on black painted AEV wheels also really do help, in terms of traction and absorbing some bumps. Although this thing does tend to beat you up a little bit more, than say the Silverado 1500 ZR2 does, but the cabin itself is still a heck of a lot more comfortable, given there's a lot more space in here. It's also helpful to have all of these different camera modes as well. You can see under the vehicle, to the sides of the vehicle, all around the vehicle, which does help when you're coming up upon some pretty big boulders and obstacles. It's even got a front camera washer that happens when you hit the normal windshield washers, it also washes off the the front camera. So keeps things nice and clear and clean, allows you to see what's going on around you. But, it does pretty good on a hill climb here, 'cause there's a ton of torque! And the four wheel drive system is excellent. Point it at something, up you go. (Aaron laughing) Is it the most comfortable ride in the world? No! But- (Aaron grunting) does what it needs to do. (Aaron exclaiming) I feel like I've had a workout. (Aaron laughing) So yeah, Chevrolet has created a ZR2 off-road pickup for just about anyone's desires, in anyone's size requirements. You like the small little Colorado? You want a slightly larger 1500 Silverado? Or the big daddy 2,500 HD? They've got one for you. Now, which is our favorite? Well, frankly, I like an aspect of all of them. I like the nimbleness of the Colorado, I like the comfort of the 1500 Silverado and frankly I like the size and sheer audacity and massive torque of the 2,500 HD Silverado ZR2. But rest assured, there's gonna be one that fits your needs as well. If you'd like to learn more about the new lineup of Chevrolet's ZR2 off-road pickups, you can look everything up at cars.com. (engine reverberating)