2010 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Hybrid - Review

By John Voelcker

John Voelcker

Senior Editor BIO

John is Senior Editor for High Gear Media. In addition to news coverage and new car reviews, John creates and oversees all editorial for High Gear's... More

LATEST ARTICLE
Kia Trackster Concept: 2012 Chicago Auto Show Preview
Like much of the auto press, we'll be at next week's Chicago Auto Show to see the covers come off... Read More

• #6LEADERBOARD RANK
• 2088ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED
• 739COMMENTS POSTED

2010 Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid

Sometimes you need a pickup truck—and nothing else will do. Full-size pickup trucks make up roughly one in every five vehicles sold in the U.S. market, though they’re a vehicle type largely restricted to North America, where gasoline is cheap. The rest of the world is more likely to use what we’d consider midsize or even compact pickups.

They’re also gas hogs. For 2010, only a couple of the full-size pickups from GM (Chevrolet or GMC), Ford, Ram (nee Dodge), Toyota, and Nissan are offered with anything smaller than a V-8 engine. Their bluff profiles, frequent heavy loads, and prodigious torque mean that 15 miles per gallon is about average for pickup-truck fuel economy.

So when we needed to haul several hundred pounds of cabinets and pick up some 12-foot lumber one recent weekend, we decided we’d test the green alternative to a thirsty conventional pickup: the 2010 Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid.

Sales of the Silverado Hybrid (and its near-identical twin, the GMC Sierra Hybrid) have hardly set the world on fire. In fact, they’ve been lousy: The trucks went on sale in late summer 2009, but GM had sold just 1,576 of them by year end. That’s less than 18 percent of the 8,820 vehicles sold with the Two-Mode Hybrid system, used both in pickups and in three of GM’s large sport-utility vehicles. This spring, Dodge canceled a Two-Mode Hybrid version of its own Ram pickup, perhaps with GM’s sales in mind. So our test truck was a rare bird indeed.

STYLING

On the exterior, the 2010 Chevy Silverado Hybrid has nothing to give it away as a hybrid except a handful of additional chrome badges. There’s one on the tailgate, and one high up on each front fender. That’s it.