Watch the Motor Trend team put three trucks (Chevy ZR2
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MotorTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 And this is the Trans-Lavender Highway
00:07 that we're gonna be going on.
00:08 And the Trans-Lavender Highway is cool
00:10 in that it's one of the last unpaved highways
00:13 in North America.
00:14 I don't know how many miles, it's several thousand.
00:17 It's basically cross country in the US,
00:18 from New York to LA.
00:19 - 3.5 liter twin turbo V6, has 450 horsepower,
00:25 and it just, it's a beast.
00:27 It just pulls strongly all the way to red line.
00:29 And it's 10 speed automatic transmission, it's great too.
00:31 It shifts really, really quickly.
00:33 It's almost seamless in the way it accelerates.
00:35 You just stomp on the gas,
00:36 and it'll pull all the way to its governed top speed
00:38 of about 100 miles an hour.
00:39 - The ZR2 was an all new truck from Chevy.
00:42 It's using an all new shock absorber
00:43 that was made for this truck, nobody else is using it.
00:46 It's got locking front and rear diffs.
00:48 Got this new eight speed transmission,
00:49 but love the tire rack.
00:51 You can get this thing, this is a two frame thing
00:52 that goes bolts in the bed of the truck
00:53 and puts the spare tire up there.
00:55 - And last is the power ride one.
00:57 It's a 6.4 Hemi V8 that it just gets you going
01:01 pretty quickly for, you know, this beast of a truck.
01:04 I mean, this is a 7,000 pound truck.
01:07 - This one has both front and rear locking diffs
01:09 so you can get yourself out of any trouble
01:10 you get yourself into.
01:11 We didn't have to use the winch,
01:12 but it's really nice and really reassuring
01:14 to have a 12,000 pound winch in the front of this bumper.
01:17 - The Transalabrador Highway has been calling to me
01:18 for a couple of years now.
01:20 - Exiting 2.5 miles on Rue de la Fond.
01:27 - When I got invited to this trip,
01:29 I didn't know what to expect.
01:31 - Next morning we come around,
01:34 we get a mile, you know, two kilometers maybe
01:37 down the road and we come around
01:39 and suddenly out of the trees appears this enormous dam.
01:42 And we're, you know, coming out the bottom of it.
01:44 We're not starting up the top.
01:45 It's just this immense wall of concrete
01:49 in the middle of the forest.
01:50 (upbeat music)
01:53 - I really like that the Ram is the manual transfer case.
02:03 In a day and age where everything's just a switch,
02:05 a button, it's just really cool to just reach down
02:09 and just shove it up and do four low
02:11 or all the way down to four high.
02:13 - Chevy Colorado CR2, I was drifting it left and right
02:16 the whole time and it was so easy to do.
02:18 And it gives you the confidence to not only do it once,
02:20 but do it many, many times.
02:22 The Raptor does its primary job
02:24 as being kind of a Baja truck, right?
02:25 It's an off-road, you know, desert racer.
02:27 (upbeat music)
02:30 - Boom. - Oh, you better drop.
02:35 - Come on. - Yeah.
02:36 - You should have put your initials.
02:38 - Oh, look at that.
02:38 Hers are way prettier than everybody else's.
02:40 - We have walkie talkies in the trucks
02:42 with us on these long road trips
02:43 talking about the truck that we're in
02:44 and the truck that we just drove last
02:46 and comparing them and what we like and don't like.
02:48 And we didn't spend that much time talking
02:50 about what we don't like about the Power Wagon.
02:53 It's just a good solid truck all the way through,
02:56 but it uses a lot of gas.
02:58 - There's apparently an actual road back here,
03:01 just access points to the individual towers.
03:03 (upbeat music)
03:06 - We'll have the next one, see if it's worth our time.
03:12 (upbeat music)
03:15 - We pulled off into a random trail and went exploring.
03:18 Our goal basically was to explore
03:19 and find our way back to the highway,
03:21 which we thought we could do.
03:22 It's just a lot of fun to just be able
03:24 to take these trucks out in the middle of nowhere
03:26 and just kind of find your own road.
03:28 (upbeat music)
03:30 - And this is where I think the Colorado
03:35 let me down a little bit.
03:36 Compared to the other two trucks here,
03:39 the driver's seat to me, it's hard,
03:41 both in the bottom and the back.
03:43 I feel like the seat cushion is a little too short.
03:45 I'd like a little more support under my legs.
03:47 And after hours and hours on the road,
03:49 those things really start to get at you.
03:52 - Well, what we've got here is the front right tire
03:57 on the Colorado, developed a slow leak yesterday.
04:00 - This is the bead right here along the wheel.
04:03 A rock essentially got wedged in the bead,
04:06 let air out of the tire.
04:07 So this is a V-lock wheel on the Ford Raptor.
04:09 This is an option, I think it's like 1700 bucks.
04:11 So basically notice these screws.
04:13 What happens is you put the tire on the wheel,
04:17 and then you put this part on top of it and bolt it on,
04:20 and it seats the bead of the tire on the wheel.
04:23 So nothing can get in there to make it go flat.
04:27 - Turns out, Timbits are a unit of measure.
04:29 We thought they were just donut holes,
04:31 but being foreigners, we had no idea
04:33 what we were getting ourselves into.
04:35 But we now know that you can use Timbits
04:37 to measure anything from distance to weight to volume.
04:41 You can literally do anything with them.
04:43 They're very versatile.
04:44 (upbeat music)
04:47 (upbeat music)
04:50 - I was in the Ram Power Wagon that day,
04:56 and the day we had the bad potholes,
04:58 and I'm really happy to be in it
05:00 because I was watching the Raptor in my rear view mirror,
05:03 get ass happy on every single bump.
05:06 - I'm moving left and right every time.
05:08 We almost lost the Timbits too.
05:10 (laughs)
05:12 - When I feel on the left side here, stay to the right.
05:14 - Yep, that one wasn't too bad.
05:16 Oh, that's a big one.
05:17 Big one on the right.
05:18 That big one's in the center.
05:21 - Scott was leading, he was calling on the walkie talkie.
05:25 The potholes, left and right, center, middle, minefields.
05:28 He was very, very enthusiastic
05:32 about what was happening in the road.
05:35 - I feel like I have a permanent curvature in my spine now
05:37 from sitting for 12 hours straight
05:38 for the last four days in a row.
05:41 - And we got four days left.
05:43 - Halfway along. - Halfway along.
05:45 - So we kept ourselves occupied for a few hours,
05:47 went and had brunch,
05:48 and did some little off-roading and whatnot.
05:51 (upbeat music)
05:59 (upbeat music)
06:02 - When we got down to the coast,
06:15 south of Port Hope Simpson,
06:17 icebergs out in the water in July,
06:20 still floating along out there.
06:22 It's just the power of surprise that this place has
06:26 and that the length of this journey
06:29 afforded us.
06:30 We saw everything from these deep, dense forests
06:32 to these rocky shores.
06:33 It was just, it's been everything I wanted it to be and more.
06:39 - It was a cool experience.
06:40 It was a very cool experience.
06:42 I wasn't expecting this.
06:43 I wasn't expecting it to be this fun
06:44 and this challenging, especially.
06:46 But it's beautiful and the Canadians,
06:49 they've treated us so well.
06:50 Everybody's so friendly here.
06:52 And yeah, I'm looking forward to come back again
06:53 to this part of the country.
06:55 - Dude, I love Canada.
06:56 It's a beautiful, beautiful country.
06:59 We've gone off on tons of random trails here in Canada.
07:02 And not only did we not see a person,
07:04 but there's no sign saying we couldn't be there.
07:06 It was just the sense of freedom
07:07 to go out and explore on your own.
07:09 It was really liberating.
07:10 And I just, I really appreciate it.
07:12 Definitely gonna come back.
07:13 - Man, this thing is a beast.
07:17 I think what I like the most about it's engine.
07:20 It's 6.4 liter V8 engine.
07:23 So the three things I like about Ram Power Wagon
07:25 are the locking diffs,
07:27 the BP manual transfer case,
07:29 and the disc-tanking sway bar.
07:31 We kept finding these side trails to go off of
07:33 and looking for fun places to get these situations,
07:36 to get the trucks into and really test them out.
07:38 And several times that day,
07:40 someone would say, "Well, Power Wagon can do it."
07:43 When the other trucks were moving around,
07:44 this thing was solid.
07:45 It was stuck to the ground.
07:47 It just powered through everything.
07:49 And it really surprised us in that.
07:50 But it didn't beat us up on the road either.
07:52 It was actually very confident and comfortable
07:55 to drive this whole distance.
07:57 (upbeat music)
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