General Motors took already great truck and made it even better

Special to the Star-Telegram

With last summer’s high gasoline prices and the resulting drop in SUV and pickup sales, there were those who pronounced the full-size truck market dead and buried.

The segment is far from dead, however, and even in last year’s down market, pickups were among the top sellers – as usual. Today, they remain that way, although the market overall remains depressed, which means pickup sales are off as well.

Yes, many of the so-called casual truckers are gone from the market. But there still are plenty of people who need pickups for their everyday occupations, and for them, nothing else will do. You can’t mow the grass out of the back of a Honda Civic, and you can’t haul materials to a construction site in that Toyota Prius.

And even though new generations of the Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram arrived for 2008, the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 – which got its complete makeover just a year earlier – still ranks up there as one of the best light-duty, full-size trucks ever built.

General Motors took an already great truck and made it even better, reinforcing my view that nobody does trucks better.

That doesn’t mean the competitors aren’t worthy as well; they certainly are. But what it does mean is that GM, despite its troubles, still provides pickups that are well-built and quite capable, and no consumer can go wrong choosing one of them, even if GM spends a couple of months in Bankruptcy Court to get its business reorganized. The company isn’t going away.

Changes to the Silverado with the ’07 remake were more functional than aesthetic. People who buy pickups, especially those who use trucks in their work, generally are looking for more-practical attributes than styling. They need to know that the truck they choose can do the job they’re buying it for – whether it looks great or not.

But the 2009 Silverado 1500 Crew Cab LT1 four-wheel-drive model (base price $32,965 plus $975 freight) we tested does look great, especially with the Z71 off-road package, along with doing everything a pickup should.

In the redesign, the Silverado’s exterior changes made the truck sleeker and more aerodynamic, helping to increase fuel economy, which is now the best in the light-duty full-size pickup segment.

Our tester came with the optional 315-horsepower, 5.3-liter V-8 engine with active fuel management, which cuts out four of the cylinders during highway cruising to increase gas mileage. The result for our four-wheel-drive model is EPA ratings of 14 mpg city/20 highway. With two-wheel drive, the ratings with the 5.3-liter engine are as high as 15 city/21 highway (with the six-speed automatic transmission).

The Silverado’s new design included a 57-degree windshield angle designed to reduce noise inside the vehicle as well as to improve fuel economy. The truck also got wider front and rear tracks to increase stability.

This latest Silverado rides on GM’s new GMT900 full-size truck platform, which is significantly stronger than the chassis of the previous generation. Besides the redesigned exterior and improved chassis, the trucks have completely new interiors, and a choice of new powertrains, suspension systems and box sizes.

Looking for comments?