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Sag Harbor funds, Salinas-grade luxury.
We just cannot talk about the GMC Yukon Denali with out obtaining the sticker-shock vapors out of the way. Gaze upon the $ 74,720 figure on our tester’s Monroney, then huff smelling salts like a teenage Dee Dee Ramone left alone with a tube of Testors’ finest cement. That is a rather eye-watering sum for a descendant of the humble GMC pickup John Steinbeck kicked around the country even though writing Travels With Charley.
Far from its 1990s/early-’00s ubiquity, the body-on-frame SUV has after again grow to be a niche car. Its smaller variants, the Ford Explorer and Dodge Durango, went unibody on their most current go-arounds. Ford’s mammoth Excursion trod the flightless path of the dodo bird 10 years ago, whilst the aging Nissan Armada, the Lincoln Navigator, and the Ford Expedition soldier on with minor revisions and refinements for the subsequent couple of years. For now, Common Motors has the newest models and owns this distinct game: It has the spread covered from the $ 46,745 base Chevy Tahoe all the way up to practically $ 100k for a loaded Cadillac Escalade ESV 4×4. Viewed via that lens, our Denali falls squarely in the middle.
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What do you get for that outlay? How about a quarter-mile time that’d be competitive with a 21-year-old Camaro Z28? This Denali, equipped with the 6.2-liter V-8 not provided on GM’s lesser SUVs, blew by way of the traps in 14.2 seconds at 99 mph. Shoddy ergs, questionable styling and all, the LT1-powered 1994 Camaro was a performance bargain in its day. And if the Denali is not the deal of this century, it at least performs in a straight line—60 mph came up in 5.5 seconds, or specifically the same time it took the Porsche Cayenne GTS. As quickly as the road curves, although, forget about it. The GMC exhibits a mere .77 g of lateral grip and the really feel is not dissimilar to that of a 21-year-old K1500 Blazer. Which is to say floaty and a bit uncertain, despite the fact that the steering no longer demands on-center sawing to make minute directional corrections. Even though it gives double the horsepower that numerous SUVs settled for in the ’90s, it also sucks gas like that old, unsophisticated throttle-body-injected truck. We recorded a meager 14 mpg—equivalent to the truck’s EPA city rating, cylinder deactivation notwithstanding. The larger Yukon XL Denali in our extended-term fleet is faring greater (17 mpg) so far but carrying out far more of its miles in highway-cruise mode.
Inside, the Denali’s upgraded materials nonetheless do not very cut the asking-sum mustard. Our tester priced out roughly the same as a base Porsche Cayenne S. And although the Leipzig-built ute’s alleged mission is diverse from that of this bruiser from Arlington, Texas, there’s tiny point in pretending that they’ll do something but commit most of their days carrying out the exact same sorts of things. And inside, there’s merely no comparison. The Porsche’s interior materials, fit, and finish completely shame the large GMC’s. The Variety Rover Sport, which provides up some power to the Cayenne and the GMC unless you splash out Escalade income for the supercharged V-8 variant‚ similarly makes the huge Yank’s cabin appear Walmart-grade. Sure, the GMC’s got pickup-rooted rock-solid guts and does that American friendly-intimidation point much better than the smaller sized Euro-utes, but the galoot-in-a-low cost-suit vibe is instantly apparent if you have spent any time in the offerings from the opposite shores of the Atlantic.
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If GM desires to wean itself from its money-on-the-hood addiction, it has to provide interior top quality on par with the competitors. And the competitors, when you’ve pumped your value this high, is utterly fierce. The Infiniti QX80, another dreadnought-grade, body-on-frame machine that commands related entry costs, feels opulent inside in comparison to the Denali. A single may possibly argue with its Zentraedi-battlepod looks, but Infiniti spent the money to do it right. The Yukon nails the huge, blocky, and butch theme—it’s a vast aesthetic improvement more than its droop-faced predecessor, but it just doesn’t really feel nice enough to play at this price point.
By the time Steinbeck penned his portrait of America at midcentury, he was at the end of a storied career—a man whose letters had brought him fame and the sort of cash-flushness most lowly scriveners will by no means reside to see. He had the wherewithal to summer season in Sag Harbor. The Long Island town is exactly the sort of location exactly where the Denali may possibly be put to operate nowadays. Ferrying the children to college, putting the boat in, doing the unluxurious grunt work the lush life demands. It is just that, nicely, that life calls for a shade far more consideration to actual luxury.
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2015 GMC Yukon Denali Tested: Big Funds Brute in a Low cost Suit
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