WE'VE STRUCK GOLD WITH OUR LONG-TERM SILVERADO
For such a car-crazy crew, we sure love our trucks. And when you’re talking about one as unimpeachable as our long-termChevrolet Silverado, we prize it as much as anything in our roller-cabinet toolbox.
Ironically, that’s the reason behind the drop in miles logged during the truck’s second quarter in our stead. Where the Silverado eclipsed 7,000 miles in the first three months, we barely hit 12,000 through the first half of the year, deploying our favorite tool more frequently but for jobs much closer to home.
The shorter drives also account for the slight drop in fuel economy, with our average dipping to just 16.1 mpg.
Several staffers had hauling duties for which nothing else in our fleet would do: fetching a pinball machine; picking up a couch, washing machine and dryer; carting a few loads of lumber from the local home-improvement store. Another Autoweek editor had need to tow, as he says, a “stricken motorcycle home on a rented U-Haul trailer. The truck didn’t seem to notice.”
The quarter opened with the metro Detroit area experiencing its biggest flood in a century, with many residential streets completely submerged. One editor observed, “This truck is an absolute stud. All of the east-west routes were flooded … but the Chevy ran through it all no problem. If everyone had a Silverado, the roads would have been open!”
Meantime, one reader we heard from remarked on the truck’s $55,170 sticker, questioning the value of a luxury short-box truck, calling it “too much flash, not enough function, and, at $55K, an unfathomable luxury for anyone making a living with their truck.” While at least one staffer sympathized (“Is this a truck or a crossover with a bed?”), the remainder of the staff would counter that anyone buying a Silverado configured like ours would likely not be “making a living carting stuff around in the back of this thing,” as our sympathetic staffer admitted.
As for that reader? We agree it’s a lot of coin, at least on paper. But when you consider all those luxury sedans and crossovers costing that much or more, we don’t think it’s too much—especially considering the majority of truck owners aren’t using them strictly for work. In fact, there are hundreds of ways to configure any full-size pickup. We submit that’s the beauty of the breed—long cabs, short cabs, long beds, short beds, various engines and suspension and payload ratings. We happen to love ours just the way it is.
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