Chevrolet Colorado shoppers have a lot of choices to make when they head into their local dealers to buy. Extended or crew cab? Short bed or long? Rear- or four-wheel drive? Should I get a 2.5-liter gas I-4, 3.6-liter gas V-6, or the 2.8-liter turbodiesel I-4 engine? For quite a few customers, the rationale for going diesel boils down to two things: fuel economy and tow capacity.
Let’s examine the latter.
Our long-term 2016 Chevrolet Colorado Z71 Duramax is the heavy hauler of the Colorado lineup. Its 2.8-liter turbodiesel I-4 only makes 181 horsepower to the 3.6-liter V-6’s 305 ponies, but its 369 lb-ft of torque shames the six-cylinder’s 269 lb-ft. Opting for the Duramax diesel engine over the V-6 also automatically adds trailering equipment to the Colorado, including a hitch and receiver, electronic trailer brake controller, and an exhaust brake. (That equipment is also available on V-6 Colorados, save for the exhaust brake.) The diesel and trailering equipment give our Colorado Duramax long-termer a 7,600-pound trailer capacity to the V-6’s 7,000-pound rating. That difference boils down to about a motorcycle’s worth of weight, but it can mean the difference between making one trip or several.
As an apartment-living city dweller, I don’t have a horse trailer or off-road toys to move. What I did have, though, was an old couch that is a good 3 feet longer than our Colorado Z71’s 5-foot bed, and it needed to get from Los Angeles to my brother-in-law’s place in Redding, California (“the second-sunniest city in America!”). Instead of driving across the state with a couch hanging precariously out of the bed, I went to a local U-Haul, rented what’s probably the oldest 4-by-8-foot trailer in the fleet, shoved the couch in, and set off.
It became pretty clear right off the bat that the unbraked trailer’s 1,000 pounds combined with the couch’s roughly 350 pounds hardly taxed the Colorado’s powertrain. The Chevy’s Tow/Haul mode, which is integrated with the exhaust brake, helped keep the 2.8-liter in its powerband by holding gear ratios. I did find the mode largely unnecessary for the amount of weight I was towing; acceleration off the line was slower, obviously, but the truck neither struggled nor stuttered from the extra weight. Maintaining California’s criminally low 55 mph speed limit while towing was a cinch, too, so much so that I frequently found the Colorado’s speedo creeping up to a more prudent 70 mph completely unintentionally. Curiously, with Tow/Haul mode engaged, the truck would often cruise at 70 mph in fifth gear, and turning it off would spur the transmission into upshifting into sixth gear without any noticeable difference in forward speed.
Where the Tow/Haul mode did make a difference was braking. With the Tow/Haul engaged, the Colorado also uses the diesel engine’s compression as a brake to help slow the rig down. It really seemed to make a difference when slowing the unbraked trailer; it downshifted smartly and stopped the truck nearly as quickly as it would stop without a load hanging off the hitch.
Although my trip north was largely a straight shot up I-5 (“Most boring road in the Western Hemisphere!”), navigating both L.A. and Redding at either end with the trailer in tow was pretty easy. The Colorado’s small size and good turning radius made squeezing down narrow streets and alleyways easy, and mirrors proved to be sufficiently sized to make sure I wasn’t clipping parked cars or running over small children while reversing.
All in all, our long-term Colorado proved to be quite capable of towing a little load a long ways. And the best part (aside from my brother-in-law’s new old couch) is that I averaged an actual 24.4 mpg doing it.
Read more on our 2016 Chevrolet Colorado Z71 Diesel:
The post 2016 Chevrolet Colorado Z71 Diesel Update 3: Long-Distance Tow Test appeared first on Motor Trend.
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