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Close, but No Cigar For Colorado Duramax as 4X4 of the Year


Gorehamj

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John Goreham
Contributing Writer, GM-Trucks.com
1/11/2016

Petersen's 4x4 and Off-Roader of the year is the 2016 Toyota Tacoma. In 33 years of conducting this testing and granting the award, a Toyota product has only won Petersen's four times. Last year the Toyota 4Runner won. However, we looked at Petersen's excellent overview of the voting process and realized that this one came as close to a tie as practical.

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The Colorado Z71 Duramax was the Chevy product in the evaluation. The Colorado was close to the Tacoma in every evaluation criteria. However, it tied the Toyota in the "Empirical" evaluation (meaning spec sheet). Colorado beat the Tacoma in the "Mechanical" section and also the "Interior" section. The two were tied in the "Exterior" voting. The Toyota won the "Ride and Drive" and "4-Wheel Attributes" sections.

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Because it won't ruin the story for you, and since it is at the very start of the story, we will leave you with this longish quote form the Petersen's report: "The minutia that helped the Toyota Tacoma TRD Off-Road eke out a win over a potent and effective Chevy Colorado Z71 with a 2.8L Duramax Diesel are hard to determine, but what certainly didn’t hurt were the Tacoma’s cost (relative to competitors), potent and effective manual rear locker, finely tuned suspension, and complex yet very effective electronic Crawl Control. This truck excelled in almost every aspect of our test, proving capable in all of our off-road testing environments, always clawing forward, and only stopping after the bar set by other contenders."

 

You can view the Petersen's story right here.

Note: Images are not from the testing.

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All the more reason for GM to deliver...ZR2!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

Don't hold your breath. GM has shown it'll take chances in the sports car segment (and then mop the competition) but the truck side does no such thing.

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Only about 1% of Toyota owners will ever use the "crawl" mode. Not sure why that helped it win.

It is a 4x4 and off-road mag.. The outcome would most likely been different if they weren't biased towards how good the trucks are off road.. I really can't imagine many people are going to be doing extreme off-roading in a brand new colarado anyway. The truck is meant for the street.

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