Gadgetory

it's not often you get a whole new truck on the market but that's just happened very recently with Chevy Colorado and this guy gmc's Canyon this is kind of a more upscale more heavily equippable of the two so let's get a full taste of what GM is doing in the mid-size truck category as we drive this 15 Canyon four-wheel drive with v6 check the tech now the formula for Chevy's Colorado or gmc's Canyon is basically fourfold first of all it's on a percent truck just less of one efficiency no v8 is available car like ride quality appointments and to a fair degree into your cabin tech and big boy truck styling now here are the configurations you can get your canyon in we've got the crew cab with the shorty you can also get a crew cab with a long bed there's also an extended cab that has a full length bed and on top of that you get the choice of two wheel drive or four-wheel drive four-wheel drive adds quite a bit as an overall package and the cost we're gonna focus on that here compared to a full-size Sierra with a crew in a long bed the canyon would be over 14 inches shorter nearly six inches narrower and over three inches lower now inside our Canyon we've got a canyon or two to deal with lots of these deep set kinds of wells for the head unit for the lower console the gauges and the ancillary are pushed way back very sculpted look now this is IntelliLink which is one of the many flavors of whatever length that General Motors puts out there in their cars I'm not going to spend too much time on it we've showed it to you before it's a pretty good nav system not that difficult to use some folks really don't like this idea of persistent bottom menus or the way they've kind of tablet eyes these icons here I don't find that a bad system at all what I don't like is that it's like so many others that stick a bunch of buttons down at the bottom or the edge of the screen where it's hard to get a finger on them but little things matter when it comes to interface now the OnStar icon brings us to a discussion about 4G in this vehicle you can get it with the built-in 4G LTE connection primarily that power is a hot spot in the car which I find to be kind of half brain-dead most folks aren't gonna find that all that valuable increasingly though on stars just announced they're going to be doing services in the car that are powered by that 4G connection like one that's called at your service that will predictably find things you want either on your route or toward your destination it's trying to build more smarts into these services regardless OnStar 4G is free for the first three months and verse three gigabytes of data in that time after that a gigabyte a month will cost you either 15 or 20 bucks a month depending whether you are or are not an OnStar subscriber overall or if you're an AT&T sub you can add the car that has 4G to your mobile data bucket the mobile share thing they do for 10 bucks but then it's eating into your overall bucket drive controls in this truck are appropriate to a truck you've got some paddles back here behind the wheel but those are actually controls for the interface and notice that the four-wheel drive apparatus has been very shall we say made simple you don't deal with a lot of different modes here now you can get your Canyon with a two and a half liter four but don't do that here is the 3.6 liter v6 direct injection more appropriate perhaps to a truck this is gonna give you a nice 305 horsepower 269 pound-feet of torque not overwhelming numbers but serviceable for something that we might have a payload in it right which by the way it can be around sixteen hundred and twenty pounds although in all-wheel-drive mode you can only get 1550 as a payload either way any configuration tows 7000 your mpg will vary but in the four-wheel drive mode it's 17 24 and that's regular gas you can get a six-speed manual on a four banger but all the v6 trucks have a six-speed automatic a 2.8 liter diesel is also slated for late 2015 in the 2016 models as I mentioned the very beginning of this piece these are real trucks and certainly in this four-wheel-drive configuration it handles and drives like one you've got a very firm suspension that is part of its real truck routes and of course rather good payload and towing capacity it does mean that on very undulating or bad pavement you feel it the powertrain even though we have the bigger and more powerful of the engines is uninspiring there's good power there but it never comes on in a terribly enthusing way that said the overall ride quality aside from the stiffness of the suspension is very good I don't get any wallow this way I don't get any porpoising this way which some trucks will do to you it's tight as a drum things are ergonomically well done big buttons and knobs you can run everything with your gloves on and sight lines all around are pretty good in general this is a truck that feels like it's got some real capability you feel like you'll be able to get done pretty much whatever you need to unless you're a heavy truck user and if so you don't need truck advice from me and at the same time you're gonna get a very comfortable vehicle that is not onerous to get around suburban environments now pricing on a canyon is going to start at $35,000 for four-wheel-drive because it doesn't come in a super cheap trim level four-wheel-drive means you're also gonna get an SLE which is a pretty nice trim then we're going to add two things we want and two things we don't we want Driver Alert for 400 bucks that's forward collision and lane departure we have to get the convenience package for 500 bucks to get it we want navigation for 495 and we have to get Bose audio for 500 to get that all right I don't really mind having Bose audio and the price is fair all in Shia 37 grand