Yahoo Autos 2024 GMC Canyon AT4X AEV Edition First Drive Review: The business-class Bison
McALLISTER, Mont. – Not far from Montana’s Ramshorn Peak is a beautiful body of water known as South Meadow Creek Lake. It sits just a hair below 9,000 feet and offers beautiful views of the surrounding highlands and — if you’re lucky and the lighting is just right — a clear line of sight to Big Sky Country. To hear the locals tell it, you can’t get there in a pickup truck. Apparently, to a GMC engineer, that comes across as an open challenge.
And so I found myself in the two-horse town of McAlllister (not far from Bozeman), chilly in the fog of an early October morning, inspecting a line of GMC’s midsize trucks in their hardest of hardcore variations. One half of the fleet was made up of the standard 2023 Canyon AT4X finished in a beautiful scarlet red; the other half, 2024 Canyon AT4 AEV Editions in a menacing gray that matched the dreary morning sky.
Yep, that AEV. The Canyon AT4X is an already-capable little trail monster with all the off-road bells and whistles you could possibly ask for. It’s a virtual mechanical twin to the new Chevrolet Colorado ZR2, in fact, down to the 2.7-liter four-cylinder that produces 310 horsepower and a whopping 430 lb-ft of torque. Naturally, American Expedition Vehicles managed to turn that dial up to 11. More on that later.
To the locals' point above, off-road trucks have existed for quite some time (just ask Marty McFly), but it has only been since their rise in popularity as mainstream commuters that the dedicated four-wheelin’ pickup has really come into its own. The “you can’t get there from here” Maine attitude at Bozeman latitudes betrays somewhat old-school notions about four-wheeling — and the fact that just about everybody in town owns some sort of ATV or side-by-side.
The formula used to be pretty simple: You take the shortest SUV frame you’ve got, add big stick axles to the front and rear, and then jack the thing up as high as you can without it falling over at the first sign of an incline. Today’s torque-monster engines have turned that on its ear. More torque means you can turn bigger tires, and what do bigger tires do? Well, among other things, they lift your truck off the ground. Shove enough tire under a truck and no matter where you’re talking about, you can indeed get there from here.
At its core, AT4X isn’t groundbreaking. Superficially, the package includes a unique front fascia, skid plates and a Baja drive mode for higher-speed desert running, but the fundamentals of a good 4x4 haven’t changed despite the broader trends. Front and rear locking differentials? Check. Beefier springs and a frame lift for more ground clearance? Yep. But its real party trick is a set of Multimatic DSSV (Dynamic Suspensions Spool Valve) dampers. A technical explanation would take up too much space, so read this, watch this, or just be satisfied with knowing their greatest strengths are simplicity and versatility.
Simplicity in that unlike the uber-fancy suspension systems offered on luxury off-roaders, they don’t require fancy electromagnetic systems or air springs to work their magic. Plain, fixed steel will pair with them just fine.
Versatility translates to a beautiful ride and precision control whether you’re on or off pavement, and GMC made sure we got a serious dose of both. Our trek to McAllister took us down the side of a mountain, half on asphalt and half on well-groomed dirt. From the cabin, the two were virtually indistinguishable. Road noise was virtually nonexistent from the 33s on either surface, and the truck remained placid but communicative over patches of ice and mud. October in Montana, man.
Naturally, our route back out of “town” took us up the side of another pointy rock. This time, we were pointed at the lake. We aired down and set off, working our way back down the road surface hierarchy from asphalt to loose gravel and then finally ungroomed dirt and stone as the Aspen trees gave way and the pines closed in around us. The midsize Canyon felt conspicuously huge trying to navigate a path that was probably first carved by caribou — like my two-door Wrangler, a now-nearly-extinct species in these parts.
