Yahoo Autos Tested: 2024 GMC Sierra EV Denali Edition 1 Piles On the Posh
UPDATE 10/9/24: This review has been updated with instrumented test results.
Say "Sierra EV" fast enough and it sounds a lot like CR-V, an odd thing to hear when surrounded by GM engineers at their Milford Proving Ground home base, but a compact Honda crossover this is not. A light-duty EV pickup that weighs more than a three-quarter-ton truck and has a hood just as tall would be a revelation if we hadn't witnessed such a thing before, including two developed by the same folks. While not likely to be as common as a CR-V, the 2024 GMC Sierra EV intends to bring electric pickups further into the mainstream. That's what GMC hopes, anyway.
Like the Silverado RST and the Hummer EV Edition 1 before it, the Sierra EV arrives first with the fully loaded model. It's dubbed Denali Edition 1 and is the only variant available for a brief 2024 model year. A regular, nearly loaded Denali will be joined by Elevation and AT4 trims for 2025.
Before we get too far down Sierra Lane, a little about how GM sees differentiation among this trio. The GMC Hummer EV pickup is the all-out, everything electric truck with the most power, trick features, and general outlandishness. Chevy's e-Silverado is intended to be sporty, at least in looks—note its smoother front end and rakish sail panels (and recall that RST stands for Rally Sport Truck).
The Sierra EV, on the other hand, leans into luxury. That means it gets the nicest and quietest cabin. It also refrains from broadcasting its EV-ness to the world. There's no contrasting-color E on the badge like the electric Silverado has. Only a Sierra EV badge on the tailgate lets on that this giant is powered by electrons.
Its bluff front end (the designers refer to it as a fist in the wind) makes no apologies to the air it's designed to break, and the Sierra EV's sail panels are similarly upright, dropping down to the bed rails at a steeper angle than the Silverado's. The indoor/outdoor MultiPro MidGate is present, as is the trick MultiPro Tailgate, and in concert they open up a max of 10 feet, 10 inches of cargo length. While the "eTrunk" frunk features two drains so it can store wet gear and be used ostensibly as a cooler, there's no lip on the front edge to prevent ice or icy beverages from spilling out.
The perimeter of the shield that takes the place of a grille and the GMC lettering within light up at night. (Nothing says "I'm driving an EV" like an energy-wasting lighting signature.) There's a neat animation that happens after unlocking the doors, where it cycles through all of the various elements and then lights up each letter in the logo in sequence. The three hashmarks in the upper lighting elements communicate charging progress. High- and low-beams are situated lower down in the bumper as a courtesy to other drivers, likely giving them a better view of the light show as they pass
Unique Sameness
The Denali Edition 1 is mechanically identical to the Silverado EV RST. When asked how the electric GMC and Chevy differ in tuning, a GM engineer gave a very simple answer: They don't. Instead, uniqueness comes in the form of interior and exterior styling, as well as some differing feature availability.
Like the other top-trim Ultium trucks, the Denali has rear-wheel steering that significantly tightens up its turning radius and improves high-speed stability. The electric Sierra borrows the CrabWalk feature from the Hummer EV and rides on the same adaptive air springs that the electric Hummer and Silverado feature.
Max Power, the Name You'd Love to Touch...
Like Homer Simpson, the folks at GMC appear to have gotten inspiration for this truck's ultimate-output mode from a hair dryer. You won't see "Max Power" anywhere on the truck's screens, however; summoning all 754 horsepower and 785 pound-feet of torque requires a tap of the hammer pictogram on the center display's drive modes page. GMC people refer to this image as Thor's hammer and its activation as "dropping the hammer."
Floor it from a stop in this mode, and you're treated to a futuristic engine-note replacement and a better view of the sky as this many-ton truck lifts its nose. The steering goes a bit squirrelly as your forearms tense up to ensure continued control. Lift off the accelerator and the front end hammers back down toward earth. It's certainly dramatic, but the drama comes in the form of these other sensory inputs that distract from the chest-through-the-seat feeling endemic to high-power EVs. GMC claims a sub-4.5-second zero-to-60-mph time with Thor's fullest unleashed; we clocked a Silverado EV RST at 4.1 seconds with its WOW mode enabled, and what do you know, the Sierra EV matched that performance exactly. It also burst through the quarter-mile in 12.6 seconds at 111 mph, again mirroring the Chevy's result. Makes sense considering the pair absolutely crushed the scale to the tune of the same 8800 pounds.
While you can disable the piped-in whirring by customizing the My Mode driving mode, Max Power overrides that preference. Its sound—more Star Wars than Marvel—is fun under hard acceleration, but the constant background noise when driving around in hammer mode is tiring. Given that the engineers did more work to keep outside noise out in the Edition 1—there's acoustic glass that's not offered on the Chevy, plus additional sound-deadening material for the cabin—it's a little odd that you can't enjoy max-attack power in silence. Cruising at 70 mph, however, the GMC is quieter than the Chevy: We measured 67 decibels versus 69 in the Silverado RST.
GMC reps didn't share a nominal, non-Max horsepower rating, but they tell us the powertrain settles somewhere around 400 horsepower in normal driving. Tagging in Tow-Haul mode ups available output, again to levels unknowable by us mere mortals. We did have the chance to tow a roughly 5000-pound trailer around Milford's circle track—with Super Cruise enabled—and noticed that the trailer's weight was, well, hard to notice. The only tells that there was something yoked to the rear were the subtle back-and-forth tug of the trailer and its appearance on the feed transmitted to the truck's rearview camera mirror display.
Feeling Regular
The electric Denali has a one-pedal driving mode with High, Normal, and Off settings for regen aggressiveness, plus a paddle behind the steering wheel's left spoke that lets you effect stops no-footed; it operates progressively, much like a trailer-brake-controller gain slider, giving you finer control of regen.
Super Cruise is as impressive here as in other GM products. It can handle lane changes either automatically when it sees an opening or when prompted by a flick of the turn-signal stalk. That feature could be more assertive though, especially when moving back to the right after a pass.
Setting the steering to Sport, which can only be done through the customizable My Mode, provides more aggressive rear steering, helping further shrink this truck's size in your mental model. With the truck left in Normal mode, its bigness and heft are obvious, but the air suspension prevents anything too untoward; the Sierra EV keeps its composure when hustled, and there's no crashiness over big bumps. As long as you avoid big stabs of the right pedal, the truck keeps a balanced attitude. With the same Michelin Primacy LTX footwear as its bow-tie counterpart, the Sierra's 0.73-g lateral grip was fractionally better than the Silverado's—same with its 199-foot stop from 70 mph.
GMC's fanciest EV has a 205.0-kWh battery and an estimated range of 440 miles, just like the top Chevy. The Silverado EV RST is the fastest fast-charging EV we've evaluated, sucking down juice at an average rate of 198 kilowatts when going from 10 to 90 percent. The RST went 400 miles in our 75-mph real-world highway range test, putting it toward the top of that chart, and we expect similar results for the Sierra. A 10,000-pound towing capacity should be sufficient for most truck stuff, just not enough to tow another electric Sierra on a trailer.
Screen Time
The biggest differentiator between the Silverado and Sierra EVs may be their screen setups. The 16.8-inch portrait center touchscreen is unique among electric GM trucks (the Hummer has a 13.4-inch landscape display, while the Chevy has a 17.7-inch landscape unit). The Sierra's screen floats in front of the horizontal dashboard and takes the tablet look so far that there's a power button on the side of its enclosure.
The lower portion of the display is reserved for persistent controls for climate functions, some of which can also be adjusted using physical switches and toggles below the screen. A volume knob is integrated as well. The rest of the screen's real estate can be divided into three "cards"; the largest at the top is full width and shows navigation, while two half-width slots below can be customized to your liking. (And no, smartphone mirroring is not on the menu.) We found it handy to keep the drive modes down there; it meant less hunting and stabbing when we wanted to adjust and was easier than remembering which of the many screens—including Controls, Settings, and Driver Modes—housed Thor's hammer and how to get to it. The user interface could also use some work when it comes to showing selected states for the various modes. On the drive-mode screen in particular, it was hard to tell which was set—with the available buttons all showing a blue highlight on a black screen, it just wasn't clear which was most highlighted.
We had one small quibble with the gauge display in relation to the driver's eyeline. For the vertically disadvantaged among us, your author included, it's impossible to see the gauges over the wheel due to their close coupling. Mostly framing the rectangular display through the crescent-shaped opening required moving the wheel upward more than was comfortable. The display itself is littered with telltales of all sorts—CrabWalk activated, rear steering deactivated, Thor's hammer invoked—laid out in no discernible pattern. This is the "modern vehicles are too complicated" problem in visual form. Breaking up the display into defined sections would help; as it stands, everything is spread across a black background. One cool tech touch: The wireless charging pad is trimmed with wood veneer topped with strips of grippy material.
The Edition 1s are all spoken for, and customer deliveries are happening now. Production of 2025 models begins later this year. Not as extra as the Hummer nor as sleek as the Chevy, the Sierra EV is a fist punch to the fickle winds of electric-vehicle adoption.
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