In Defense Of Chevy’s Forgotten Pickup Trucks

For the most part, when it comes to yearly sales Chevrolet has been number two in the pickup truck segment in the U.S. for a long time. That isn’t to say that Chevy trucks are bad, it’s just that truck buyers love them some Ford F-Series pickups, which have topped the charts for 48 years in a row. It’s a shame really, as Chevy has had some unique offerings over the years that were more than just your typical pickup trucks. A lot of these forgotten trucks have been lost to time, so let’s take a look at a few unique pickup offerings from Chevy’s past.

Chevy wanted in on the emerging performance pickup game in the early 1990s, so i’s engineers took off-the-shelf parts and created the bad-ass Chevy 454 SS. Based on the half-ton C1500, the 454 SS sported a monochromatic exterior design based on the C1500’s sport appearance package, which included a black grille, bumpers and mirrors. For the first couple model years they were all black, though red or white paint was later offered, and the sides of the bed were fitted with 454 SS decals with the SS finished in red.

The real performance was under the skin. Chevy borrowed the 7.4-liter V8 from its heavy duty models and threw it in the 454 SS. The massive V8 made 230 horsepower and 385 pound-feet of torque, which it put down to the rear wheels through a three-speed automatic transmission. Chevy said the 454 SS could hit 60 mph in under 8 seconds, and  it wasn’t just fast in a straight line, either. The 454 SS also received Bilstein shocks, the steering was quickened, the rear differential received higher ratios and a front stabilizer bar was added. Today the 454 SS is relatively rare, with fewer than 17,000 made over its three years of production.

While many think the GM EV1 was the company’s only attempt at an electric car in the 1990s, Chevy debuted an EV in 1997 that flew under the radar: the S-10 EV, the world’s first electric pickup. The truck was odd, mainly because Chevy engineers used the powertrain setup from EV1 and dropped it in the S-10. The result was a front-wheel-drive pickup with a 114-horsepower electric motor (23 hp less than the EV1) and a 16.2-kWh battery back that weighed 1,400 pounds. It could only do about 44 miles on a charge, but in 1998 the lead-acid battery was upgraded to a 29-kWh nickel-metal hydride pack that increased range to nearly 100 miles. Only 492 were ever made, most of which were leased to fleets and then crushed, but 60 were sold outright to fleet customers, with a handful still surviving today.

The first-generation Chevy Avalanche was brilliant when it debuted. It introduced American pickup buyers to something they didn’t know they needed: the Midgate system that allowed the rear seats to be folded down, effectively making the bed longer for more cargo capacity. What some people don’t know is that Chevy made  two flavors of Avalanche: the standard 1500 and the heavy duty 2500.

The Avalanche 2500 was all about tough-ness, towing and hauling. It got rubber floor mats, more durable carpet, bigger off-road tires, skid plates and beefier leaf springs. Under the hood, Chevy dropped in its massive 8.1-liter Vortec V8 thatmade 320 horsepower and 440 lb-ft of stump-pulling torque. This gave the Avalanche 2500 a near-12,000-pound tow rating and over 2,000 pounds of payload capacity. Sadly the Avalanche 2500 was only ever offered on the first generation, and it was only available from 2001 to 2005.

This is a truck that even I didn’t know existed until recently. Beginning in the early 1970s, rather than make a compact pickup on its own, Chevy approached Isuzu to borrow its small pickup called the Faster. The result was the badge-engineered Chevy LUV, which apparently stood for Light Utility Vehicle. Despite its small size, Chevy offered the LUV with a standard six-foot or an optional seven-and-a-half-foot bed, which looked weird on a truck so small. Power came from a 1.8-liter inline-4 that made all of 75 horsepower; the engine gained an extra five horses a few years later. The LUV would last until 1982 when it was replaced by the S-10, the same year it started to be offered with a 2.2-liter diesel engine.