Fancy suspensions, high ground clearance, and knobby tires. Our 2018 Truck of the Year competition bordered on Off-Roader of the Year, thanks to three entrants packing hardware aimed at rock crawling and desert racing. Although they’re specially equipped, that doesn’t entail a free pass from the rigorous towing drills or extensive judging criteria applied at every TOTY competition.
Chevrolet was eager to send two examples of its off-roading midsize Colorado ZR2 armed with Multimatic shocks—one featuring a new V-6 and new eight-speed auto under its hood and the other chugging along with a Duramax turbodiesel.
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Long a formidable contender, the Ford F-150 was back this year with a whopping four variants showcasing the unmatched range of the half-ton’s lineup. The F-150 XL work truck, for example, entered the fray with a new 3.3-liter V-6. The popular 2.7-liter EcoBoost V-6 and the 5.0-liter V-8 are in the competition after significant revisions, and the second-gen Baja-bruising Raptor brought off-road cred to the F-150 arsenal.
Rounding off the competition: GMC’s 2018 Sierra Denali 3500 HD and its thunderous new 6.6-liter Duramax turbodiesel, now with 910 lb-ft of torque.
Each truck brought its own special set of skills and made a strong case to be Truck of the Year. But only one could secure our Golden Calipers.
Read about 2018 Truck of the Year Finalists:
TESTIN’ AND TOWIN’
From Proving Ground to the Davis Dam
Each truck endured a week’s worth of extensive tests, starting at Fiat Chrysler Automobile’s proving ground in Yucca, Arizona. Here, we took advantage of acres of asphalt to perform instrumented testing and used five trailers precisely weighted and prepped to match each truck’s claimed maximum towing capacity. We made our annual journey to the Davis Dam grade to knock out our Frustration Testing index, made possible with a hulking trailer and John Deere mini excavator totaling 7,740 pounds. And after dedicating a full day evaluating each truck on a 21-mile road loop in and around Kingman, we reached a decision for the 2018 Truck of the Year.
TRAILER TIME Maxing out each truck’s capability
Prep work for our vital towing tests began long before we even stepped foot in Fiat Chrysler’s desert playground. On-site staffers and mechanics spent days building out five trailers with varying weights: one with 5,000 pounds of mass (for the light-duty trucks) and a three-axled gooseneck unit that tipped the scales at a staggering 22,700 pounds (for the heavy-duty GMC Sierra Denali).
Our base camp was the facility’s 16.9-acre vehicle dynamics facility (the “asphalt lake”), which provided ample space
to knock out our long list of testing, photography, and video tasks in just two days.
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