SA Road Tests

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This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.
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*Please remember too, that prices quoted were those ruling on the days I wrote the reports.


We push back frontiers in the 2012 Chevrolet TrailBlazer 2.8 LTZ 4x4 manual

Seven people or two bikes

Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday February 6, 2013

Chevy Blazers; big American pickup-based SUVs that blasted trails from Yuma to Yukon in the late ‘sixties through to the early ‘nineties. The genre was revived recently as TrailBlazer, but the legend continues.

South African versions are built in Thailand and come with a choice of either a 3.6-litre petrol motor or 2.5- and 2.8-litre diesel engines designated Duramax.  The name was taken over from Isuzu but GM insists that the engines are pure Chevrolet. We drove the five-speed manual diesel with electronically selectable 2H, 4H and 4L drive, although a six-cog auto is available too.

It’s big; 4878 mm long, 1847 mm high and 1902 mm wide – wide enough to be thankful that its side mirrors can be folded back when navigating through your front gate. The upside is that it’s a genuine seven-seater. Fully grown people can actually sit in the back chairs, although six-footers might prefer to move forward a row when travelling long distances. Without passengers, you could fit a couple of bicycles in there quite easily.

Appointments are pleasant. There’s leather upholstery, climate controlled air conditioning with repeater vents in the roof for those in the rear, power windows and mirrors, an eight-speaker music system with MP3 compatible CD player and radio, Bluetooth, a mini USB port for which Chevrolet supplies an adaptor cable, helpful side steps, rear window defogger and wiper, passenger grab handles and a full house of 11 cup holders. A thoughtful touch is that the cargo cover has its own storage spot for those occasions on which the third row seats are being used. In most other cars, it either gets in the way or has to be left at home.

Safety issues are taken care of with six airbags, ISOFix anchorages, disc brakes front and rear with ABS, EBD, EBA, stability control, fade assist, hill descent control, trailer sway assist and engine drag control. The driver will appreciate his or her six-way powered seat, cruise control, ample storage, sunspecs box, rear parking assistance, illuminated vanity mirrors and steering wheel-mounted controls for sound, phone and cruising.

In case we frightened you with talk of this car being based on a pickup, earlier, be assured that Chevrolet managed to marry ruggedness with comfort very effectively. You get all the rigidity of a ladder frame chassis, but instead of the usual agricultural underpinnings, GM provided short- and long arm independent suspension with coil springs and twin-tube dampers up front and an independent five-link setup with similar springs and dampers at the rear. Apart from increased comfort, the coil-sprung designs provide lots of articulation, keeping the wheels on the ground where they belong.

Although the suspension is European-style firm, the proof lies in very competent rocky road trail riding with good stability and reasonable comfort on gravel byways. The 2.8-litre diesel in our test car performed willingly if not wickedly fast, getting to 100 km/h in just under 12 seconds and being capable of 180. It turned over at about 2300 rpm in top at 120, but did not roll on particularly strongly.

Our final impression was: Nice, but a little unrefined and somewhat noisier than we expected a car with this one’s aspirations to be. Kit, style and chassis engineering is all there, but we felt as though we had been entertained by a rapper posing as an opera star.

The numbers
Price: R454 500
Engine: 2776 cc, four-cylinder, 16-valve, turbodiesel
Power: 132 kW at 3800 rpm
Torque: 440 Nm at 2000 rpm
Zero to 100 km/h: 11,8 seconds
Maximum speed: 180 km/h
Real life fuel consumption: About 10,2 l/100 km
Tank: 76 litres
Luggage: 205 to 1830 litres
Ground clearance: 231 mm
Approach and departure angles: 30/22 degrees
Warranty: 5 years/120 000 km; with roadside assistance
Service plan: 5 years/90 000 km; at annual or 15 000 km intervals

For a review of the Chevrolet TrailBlazer 4x2 diesel, click here



What We Do

This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.

What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.

My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so they can see I do actually exist.

I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax.
So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!

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