2022 Chevy Silverado ZR2 vs MUD & ROCKS! We Tow, Haul and Off-Road to See If This New Truck is Good

Well hey folks and welcome to the Truck King YouTube channel. We are out here having a great day off-road with this, the brand new Chevy Silverado ZR2. Now there's going to be lots more of this mud and water, but for now we want to hook up a trailer and haul some payload to see how hard this truck works. So if you're ready for it let's get into it right now. Let's kick this one off with the walk around. So powering our Silverado ZR2 is a naturally aspirated 6.2 liter v8 that's making 420 horsepower, 460 pound-feet of torque, sent through a 10-speed automatic. Now looking at the front end you get the unique grille, you get those bumper cutouts to allow your tires to approach opticals better, and your whole bumper is unique just to improve your approach angle. Another little detail that I like, this truck gets the flow tie and that's to help with cooling. Now as we roll back we can take a look at these, that is a set of 33 inch Goodyear Territory all-terrain tires. These are honestly becoming the standard go-to all-terrain for so many different stock off-road vehicles. Then as we roll down the middle of the truck you get a nice set of rock rails right there. Now as we get to the back I'm going to tell you the ZR2 is only available in this configuration, crew cab with the short bed, you cannot get anything else. Now we also have these great bumper steps down there and the Chevrolet Multiflex tailgate. Now when we're actually going over the off-road numbers this truck gets a two-inch lift over stock and Chevy lifts it at 11.2 inches of ground clearance, 31.8 degrees of approach, 23.3 degrees of departure, and 23.4 degrees of breakover angle. Now we can look underneath the Silverado, first of all big exposed tow hooks right in the front end, then you roll back and you get to this, a nice beefy steel skid plate and that extends beyond that front differential. Now up in here I'll show you those are the Multimatic shocks in the rear, in the front end and they're hilarious because they're so short and chubby and they really do a nice job. Now moving back we get to the next skid plate which is right there, that's to protect your transfer case. Over here you'll see the optional Borla exhaust and then one of the things that surprises me, there's no protection right here on the gas tank, that thing is just hanging out there. Now at the back end at the corners you'll see those massive Multimatic shocks and finally yes that is a full-size spare tire. Time for the payload test now folks, so we have our new rubber mats that's what we use for payload, we split them up onto skids so we have six mats on each skid but then once they're loaded into the truck we can load mats individually to make sure we're as close as we can get to the payload. In this truck we have seven mats back there plus that skid that is 700 pounds plus 500 and change pounds of Elmer's up here in the front that brings us to 1,200 probably a little bit over the 1,277 that the truck is rated for. It is after lunch. So that being said dad, it's a beautiful day, we're out cruising, what do you feel? You feel the weight back there? Yes and no. ZR2, this thing, the suspension on it of course we already know it's softer than the normal Silverado, however the way that it handles it is, the bounce back rate is fantastic. You're not bottoming, you're not jittering, so even though I feel that the back end is softer and it's doing a little bit of this, when we hit a big pothole, boom, it comes right back to where it needs to be and it doesn't throw it off. Yeah and that's exactly what the Multimatic suspension is designed to do. It's designed to give you confidence when you're working and then to give you that soft suspension you want when you're beating on an off-road and so far so good I'd say. Works as advertised. Let me show you the camera system because you can't access the cameras while you're moving. Now there's our rubber back there, there's our strap and there's the eight second timeout. So General Motors basically says you can see your stuff but you don't need to see it for more than eight seconds and I actually agree with that. I think it's unsafe when you can just look at these views indefinitely. Now that's a front end view so you can see out the nose of the truck and you can get to the rear end view. The tailgate is open right now though so that's why you're just looking down at the ground. But yeah quite a few views and again I like that at times out dad. I think that's good for safety. What do you think? It doesn't draw your attention away longer than it needs to and I really like that above camera because like today you see that strap is down low so if I look at my mirrors I can't see a strap so if I want to see if my strap is still tight that camera does it. Nice. So the next thing I want to bring up is this interior. This is a brand new interior for 2022. It's something that we ragged on in many a General Motors pickup truck for the last two years or three years basically and now we can't rag on it anymore. I think they've done a great job. We have all of this kind of high-tech feeling now with these big screens right across your dash. Decent stitching and then something I kind of really went after them about was all the black plastic and it's mostly gone. You have a different material kind of up here on your upper glove box. You got this fake carbon fiber material. It looks like they paid more attention to detail. They didn't just slap black plastic and say it's good enough. So yeah also a big home run here in the interior. Yeah absolutely and I think where it really comes home is when you get in you don't necessarily fixate on one thing just your immediate overall impression is hey this is nice. Totally. And I think that's what you want to do if you're a designer. Yeah and that was literally the opposite of the last truck where I used to get in and go why does it look like that? Particularly for that money. Yeah exactly exactly. So yeah no they've done a great job in here. Now let's go ahead and measure the squat. Because we have switched up to our rubber mats and away from our barrels we can't really compare apples to apples anymore. Plus now we are able to load these trucks up basically right to maximum by mixing and matching our mats. So when we are doing this like I said we're not going to bring up that payload chart because we can't compare that weight to this weight. Anyways let's see how much this truck was squatting. So that brings us to 39 and a half inches. 39 and one half. We'll unload her and yeah we'll see how much it raises up. Now we've got the 700 pounds out of the bed. So let's measure again. The truck has not moved and that brings us to an even 41 and a half inches. So that's actually two inches of squat. Now generally we are used to seeing two inches of squat with a thousand pounds of payload in the bed and this was just 700. So yeah I think this was squatting a little more than what you'd expect out of a half ton. But of course it's an off-road truck with the unique suspension so I think that explains it. Time to hook up the trailer folks. So I can show you the cameras here. That's your standard view. It's a rear end view and the top down. You can also get a front end in that top down. Then over here that's a top down view on your nose and that's top down on your tail. Then you can look down the sides of the truck. Those are the rear tires. Those are your front tires. This is your hitching view which is going to come in handy of course. And then finally over here we have our trailering guidelines which you can turn on and off. And there you go. So for now we'll stick with this view until we get in close and then switch over to the hitching view. So right about there. I actually want my guidelines turned back on and then we go to the hitch and boom there it is. And now it is towing time ladies and gentlemen. So the ZR2 that you see here today has a tow rating of 8,900 pounds. I know that thanks to General Motors handy dandy door jam sticker. I say it in every video. I'll say it again. I love this sticker. I think every brand should do this. It is VIN specific. So the numbers on that sticker are for this actual truck. There's no guesswork. I don't have to go online read a chart and hope I read it correctly. GM just gives you the numbers. I appreciate that. So 8,900 pounds. Trailer behind us is 7,000. So we're pretty well loaded up here dad. And I'll tell you from the passenger side it's feeling a little better than the squat suggested because it really did squat quite a bit in the rear end. However the nose is feeling high to me. So what are you feeling in terms of the squat and the nose? With this suspension we got quite a bit of droop in the back and you can see the lift in the nose. So that's the attitude. So with this truck you're gonna have to do a couple of things if you tow regularly that you don't do with a say a regular Silverado. First of all you won't be able to use a straight hitch. You're gonna need one that's adjustable because so whatever you're used to setting up with your straight Silverado is not going to work on this truck. Secondly an equalizer so that you can push some of that weight back forward because the nose is up and it makes the steering a little bit twitchy. So it handles the weight fine. The power is certainly there. Everything else is certainly there but you got to compensate for this softer suspension. And I think this is basically what you can expect out of a truck of this kind of off-road caliber. You have to kind of compromise in some areas and that's usually where you end up giving up is with your confidence when towing. I would say the same thing about a Raptor or a TRX right. They just can't quite do it all. So if you're gonna tow heavy in this truck it's gonna do it. It's just not gonna do it as competently like you said as a regular Silverado. A Silverado trail boss let's say. Granted however I just want to add that you can fix it. Like I said equalizing hitch and adjustable so that you can dial it in properly. Fair enough and there's plenty of good towing systems on this truck. I mean integrated trailer brake controller that's great. Tow haul mode and then I love the Chevy towing app that comes up here on the dash. First of all it checks your lights for you and we do have lighting issues so every truck we get into now yells at us and says hey your lights are out dummies. And then second of all it has this safety checklist. I think that's always smart. You click on it you run through all the different things you should do when you hook up a trailer so you're good to go. So yeah I like all the info that Chevy provides. It does the screen's telling us that our left turn signals are out so thank god we don't ever make right turns. That's the easiest solution to fix it. And there's one other neat system here which we just discovered. So this Silverado now has a gross combined weight alert. So it's not going to tell you what your truck weighs. What it will do is if it thinks you're over your GCW and that is the combined weight of your truck and trailer it's going to spit out an alert and say hey you're overloaded. And then there's also a button that says find public scale. You hit that it'll pull up your nav map and it'll take you to the nearest scale so you can go weigh your load. I think this is probably in response to Ford coming out with the onboard scales and I don't even really remember Chevy announcing this. They didn't make a big deal out of it. Yeah this is something where we literally just discovered it right here. Yeah. But you know what it's a little simpler than onboard scales but it's it's giving you one very important piece of information. Am I overloaded or not? Yeah period. Okay trying 0-2-60 here in the 0-2 with our 7,000 pound trailer and GPS ready hit it. Hello. Well this puts us at a 12.99 0-100 kilometers or 62 miles per hour which is pretty quick. You can see how it stacks up on the leaderboard. Okay ladies and gentlemen time for our first off-road obstacle the ditch crossing. Now it's really wet and muddy right now and we're gonna go into it in off-road mode in four high with nothing locked up and let's see what happens. Now when you're crossing a ditch like this you always want to do it at an angle so you can deal with it one tire at a time. There's front driver, front passenger and let's see if he'll climb for me. Oh no! Climb baby! It's gonna do it, it's gonna do it, it's gonna do it, it did it! Nice! Well it comes to show you right there nothing was locked up. If I had had lockers I wouldn't have even had that moment of struggle because it wouldn't have had to kind of send power around but there you go it made it through there nicely done unlocked. Now time for our offset rut so first of all you're going to see the truck flex right here and you can see what the articulation is like and then second of all this is going to show off how good the lockers are. Now it'll make it through here without the lockers and that's what I am right now not locked up at all just in four high in off-road mode and you'll see right here once I lose traction off that rear passenger it's gonna lift and now she starts to struggle and it's really gotta scratch for traction come on come on it's finding it it's going there it is hello so yes like I said we can make it through these ruts without being locked up but the truck struggles it scrapes it shoots water and mud out it's much more dramatic than when you use the lockers so now let's run through locked and I'll show you the difference coming into the ruts once again this time I'm just gonna lock up my rear end in four high you can lock the rear you have to be in four low if you want to lock up your front but right now I can just lock up my rear and once again this is going to show you just how smoothly the truck walks through here when it's locked up there should be no slippage whatsoever because power is constantly getting to both of those rear wheels no slip there none none whatsoever just creeps through and that's straight up the difference now here's another argument you guys can have in the comments because I've kind of heard from a lot of you there's two schools of thoughts on lockers a you should lock everything up before you're into an obstacle to make sure you have all of your systems available to you basically to get you through b and this is actually what dad believes and this is what he always taught me you should go into something not locked up because then if you do get stuck well at least you have one extra thing one extra piece of equipment that you can turn on and it's going to help you out of there so this is really up for debate I probably would have gone in there not locked up and I would have made it through but you just see the difference locked things like I said are much less stressful there's no drama you just get power down and you get right through obstacles already on to the next one this is rock pile time and for this I'm going to use terrain mode here in the here in the ZR2 terrain mode is essentially one pedal driving so I'm in four low and I'm only using the throttle I'm not touching the brake in fact when you lift off the throttle the truck comes to a dead stop now this little rock pile no it's not massively challenging you got to have decent angles to get up and over it without kissing any of the rocks but what it really does show you is how easy or hard it is to modulate and so far I like this one pedal drive you just have to dig into it the tiniest bit to get the power and then the second you start to lift it got the brake right there so you guys can see it from outside here but I'm able to be just incredibly smooth with this truck in terrain mode now in four low by itself you'd pretty much be able to be this smooth but uh terrain mode yeah it does help a little bit all right now it is time for the hydro line this one's going to be a little bit different when we did the launch for this ZR2 we were down in California we were able to go out in the desert and go 60 miles per hour and really fly because this is a high-speed truck it was developed during desert off-road racing but we don't have desert here and today all I have is the hydro line so I'm going to try to make this the quickest hydro line ever let's hammer down feel how the ZR2 does and there's a lot of water out here man and the power from the 6.2 feels so good the engine sounds amazing and I am being thrown around up here a little bit but for the most part man once those speeds pick up and those hits start getting harsher uh you just don't feel them up here in the cab you never feel anywhere close to bottoming out and even as I'm bouncing around yeah there's just this smoothness to the truck that is all thanks to that Multimatic suspension okay folks now we're into the deep stuff and there's so much water up here right now it's wild actually we came through with the Tacoma and the Frontier last week and those trucks fell deeper because they're just a little bit smaller this truck just walks right through come on and now let's see if we hit any rocks here on the hill nope nope nope zero clearance issues to speak of coming up that hill and that was dramatically different than like I said those two mid-sizers Tacoma Frontier which were both nailing rocks all the way along so yeah the two inch lift here really makes a significant difference okay folks and now the mud begins on the left hook let's see what this truck will do still in four high off-road mode with the rear end locked oh yeah lots of momentum let's see if it'll climb up out of the ruts out of the ruts baby yes yes yes yes yes oh he's gonna watch that one stump and then with no momentum whatsoever up the rocks heck yes zr2 well ladies and gentlemen that was so good the rear locker obviously felt great in there the tires felt excellent and then usually on the transition from pit up to hill there's a lot of spinning wheels and this truck just didn't feel like it spun at all it held its momentum and then I basically did come to a dead stop and then continued on and honestly it did super well so kudos to the tires for holding on and kudos for the truck to making that mud look so dang easy and uh the closest comparison I have right now is the ford f-150 tremor because it's the last half ton we ran through there and honestly the zr2 straight up did it better absolutely did it better and there we go coming off the other end of the left hook well you know what I just brought up that f-150 tremor so let me talk about it a little more because we just had that truck we just did all of these trails and at the end of that review I really felt like the tremor was a good competitor for this zr2 and I think that's a big question with this truck is where does it fit in because right off the bat everyone said well is it a raptor killer and the answer is no it's not the all-out bat you know what craziness of the trx and of the raptor so then the question is well does it compete with the tremor a trd pro and after doing what we just did I actually feel like maybe it's a little bit better than the tremor the clearance I think is a bit better the tires were better and then there is no question at all now once the speeds pick up this thing is absolutely better than that f-150 now also what it's going to boil down to with this truck is the price the one you see as it sits is eighty four thousand dollars canadian now it might seem like a lot of money but it actually seems like a decent bargain when you consider that a ford raptor here in canada starts closer to 90 and then the trx here in canada is over a hundred so when you look at that yeah it's it's not a horrible value and then when you look at something like that tremor well the tremor we tested was almost the exact same price and frankly I think you're getting more truck over here out of the chevy so that's really where this zr2 is placed in that sweet spot of not over the top insane crazy power and crazy suspension so that's where I think chevy has kind of nailed this sweet spot this truck is daily drivable totally livable and when you look at the competition actually relatively affordable too well folks we've come to the end of this video and as you've just seen I need to go to the wash and get all the mud off of this truck so I think the verdict here is clear no chevrolet didn't go all out crazy chasing the raptor what they did do is built a competent off-road truck that is going to be absolutely livable every single day and that's an important distinction so folks of course now I want to hear from you go below let me know what you think of this chevrolet silverado zr2 or zr2 and then as always while you're down there don't forget to hit like hit subscribe hit join to become a member and then come right back here to truck king to see what we're testing next see ya