Distance: 1,611km
Location: Ontario, Quebec
Date: September 15-17, 2022
Up front: If you’re one of those obese Americans with enough oil in your belly to power a city for a whole year, you might find this truck comfortable. Unfortunately, I’m a healthy adult and neither of my elbows can reach the armrests while driving. The cloth seats are cheap and unsupportive and the steering wheel doesn’t telescope as far as it should for a vehicle this size.
The controls are logical, but way too far and require looking down from the road to operate. The windshield wiper controls are integrated into the indicator stalk – another cost-cutting measure that makes the full-size SUV unintuitive to operate. Another unintuitive control are the gear buttons which require a combination of pulling and pressing to perform a three-point turn. Mercedes uses a column-mounter automatic shifter, there’s no reason not to have one in the Tahoe.
In the back: Its primary customers are fleets. Chevrolet sells 100,000 of these a year, not including its Suburban sibling, and the majority of those to government and commercial fleets that don’t care about passenger comfort. The seats are just truck seats and the third-row doesn’t have any amenities beyond plastic moulded cup holders. The rear windows can’t even open to vent.
It’s a big SUV, but interior space is disappointing. The cargo area is large and deep if the seats are folded down, but the loading floor is so high that it makes grocery runs a tedious exercise of lifting bags over your hips and into the back.
Driving: One of the benefits of renting a car is the opportunity of driving ones that you’ll never buy. I would never buy anything this big with a 5.3L V8 engine. The power plant pulls the heavy truck up to speed, but don’t expect much in terms of responsiveness. The power-to weight ratio would go a lot further with the same engine in a mid-size family car. I just wish they offered this lovely-sounding engine in other models.
