Yahoo Autos The Chevrolet Suburban Is the Anti-Crossover
Before "crossovers" were cars, the term was used for a certain kind of music: Inoffensive, watered-down dreck meant to appeal to as many listeners as possible without jostling their sensibilities. To anyone with decent musical taste, it's a pejorative term. Its use to describe steadfastly bland five-door family haulers is glumly accurate.
The Chevy Suburban, then, is the anti-crossover. I don't just mean that it's big and boxy in a sea of midsize two- and three-row blobs. It's a philosophical difference: While so many family trucksters try to be everything at once (sport sedan, station wagon, off-roader), the 2016 Suburban follows the same marching orders as the first one did in 1935, ten truck generations ago.
I took the Suburban you see here on a weekend trip to visit my youngest brother at college, five long-legged members of my immediate family buckled in for a sunny Saturday jaunt to Syracuse, New York. With the optional captain's chair second row, the seven-passenger 'Burban is so roomy, five strangers could ride all day without ever having to strike up a single conversation.
This LTZ-spec model was just about as loaded as a Suburban can get, with leather, 4G Wi-Fi, and a host of driver assistance and safety features. Black-and-polished 22-inch wheels, a dealer-installed option at $3000, gave some pizzaz to the Slate Gray Metallic paint, a shade I would otherwise find a little too "state government fleet vehicle" to be cool.
All this makes for a luxurious workhorse. Loaded down with the family, the Suburban's 5.3-liter, 355-hp V8 sounded exactly like it did in every U-Haul box truck I've ever rented. The oddly-placed manual shift toggle at the end of the column shifter discourages shifting for yourself, which is fine because the six-speed auto box is excellent. A GMC Yukon Denali or Cadillac Escalade with the 420-hp 6.2-liter and the eight-speed auto from the Corvette will no doubt be quicker, but the big Chevy always has adequate acceleration on tap. With the cruise control set to 68 on an uncrowded Route 81, the EPA's 22 mpg rating was easily attained.
The single most important feature that comes on the LTZ model is GM's excellent Magnetic Ride Control adaptive suspension. It does near-miraculous work of keeping the ride smooth, banishing any of the wallowing see-saw motion that made riding in the third row such a queasy novelty as a kid. It's a shame how quickly you grow accustomed to the pillowy ride-it takes switching to another vehicle altogether to realize just what GM's chassis engineers have accomplished here.
That suspension system is a perfect example of the philosophy I was talking about. Magnetic Ride Control was first developed for GM's wildest performance models, calibrated to soak up a mid-corner bump (or some track curbing) and go back to race car firm nearly instantaneously. No doubt, the system worked just as hard on the hideously unmaintained roads of my northeast rust belt jaunt as a Camaro's would on a race track.
But here's the thing: There's no "Sport" button in the Suburban. No phony-baloney "Performance" mode. And, thank heavens, no paddle shifters. In a world where Land Rover makes an SUV that laps the Nurburgring faster than an E46 BMW M3, that's a welcome relief.
Because there's something insincere about cars that attempt to do it all. Even when they're successful, like Land Rover's 'bahn-stormer, or Germany's small crossovers that are more rally car than CUV, they're compromised. No matter how you drive a genre-blurring car, you're simultaneously missing out on some untapped capability while only getting a portion of that moment's full experience.
Sure, the Suburban is compromised in its own ways. At nearly 19 feet long, it's a bear to park, despite light electric-boosted steering, an admirably tight turning radius, and cameras galore. A deep and mostly hidden front air dam and mom-approved ride height preclude any real off-roading, and even a base model (with three rows of three-person bench seats!) will set you back more than $50,000. The example I drove stickers at nearly $75,000, a number that surely causes sweat stains on the chairs at Chevy dealers nationwide.
But the Suburban of 2016 still follows the formula, if not the exact recipe, of the first Chevrolet that wore that name more than 80 years ago: A roomy, upright rig, built on truck underpinnings, meant to ferry people and cargo in large quantities and with a modicum of backcountry comfort.
If that's not a tune you like, may I suggest something from the crossover catalog.
