2023 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 First Drive: The Everyday Off-Road Truck

To adventure is the human condition. If there's been one constant over the last 300,000-some years of humanity, it's been our need to roam. Those who first ventured out of Africa or across the Atlantic might not recognize the astronauts who first explored space, but they'd likely all share the same sense of adventure. That's perhaps why automakers lean so heavily into the theme to sell new cars—SUVs are shown with tents on their roofs and happy families surrounding the campfire, and pickups with dirt bikes in the bed or off-road on a remote trailhead. Never mind the tires of most new vehicles are more likely to kiss only pavement their entire lives.

The new 2024 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2's advertising will surely drip with adventure, but then again, this midsize pickup is uniquely well suited to off-road adventure, whether that be smashing sand dunes, rock crawling, or overlanding. And as our 800-mile expedition across the Nevada desert proves, the new Colorado ZR2's bounds are only limited by your own.

The new Colorado ZR2 has big tire tracks to follow. The last-generation model is arguably single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the segment, spurring rivals like Toyota to finally take the Tacoma TRD Pro seriously, and others like Ford and Jeep to jump in with the upcoming Ranger Raptor and the Gladiator Mojave. The Chevy came with a choice of either gas or diesel powertrains, locking front and rear differentials, and Multimatic DSSV shocks, which were great at balancing on- and off-road performance.

The 2023 Colorado ZR2 picks up where the old one left off, while setting a few things down. Solely available in crew-cab/short-bed configuration, the new Colorado ZR2 ups the ante with a new gas engine (no more diesel option!), more advanced suspension, and more robust underpinnings. Like the more run-of-the-mill 2023 Colorado it's based on, the ZR2 rides on a modified version of the previous Colorado's Silverado-derived chassis. Its front axle gets pushed forward for a better approach angle and more stable ride, while under the hood it gets the Silverado's punchy 2.7-liter turbocharged I-4, which produces 310 hp and 430 lb-ft of torque—2 more horsepower than the previous Colorado ZR2's 3.6-liter V-6 and 41 lb-ft more torque than its 2.8-liter turbodiesel I-4. That gets paired to a new eight-speed automatic and a four-wheel-drive system, and backed up by electronically locking front and rear differentials.

At each corner new Multimatic DSSV shocks help boost ground clearance and deliver 9.9 inches of front suspension travel and 11.6 inches of rear, vastly improving off-road performance without hurting on-road ride or handling. Rounding out the package are aluminum skidplates underneath the engine and steering rack, a steel skidplate for the transfer case, and new 33-inch Goodyear Wrangler Territory MT tires developed specifically for the ZR2. Chevy says these new tires offer better sidewall protection and grip than the previous ZR2's 31-inch tires while significantly reducing tire noise on pavement.

Like all new-gen Colorados, the ZR2 gets a fresh interior serving up less passenger room than the truck it replaces, but more creature comforts and technology; this includes useful tech like new drive modes (Normal, Tow/Haul, Off-Road for general mud or dirt, Terrain for rock crawling, and Baja for high-speed desert running) and cameras in the truck's nose, flanks, rear, and underbelly.

While we await the coming AEV-engineered 2024 Colorado ZR2 Bison, Chevy is introducing the one-year-only 2023 Colorado ZR2 Desert Boss. An accessory package for the ZR2, it features useful upgrades such as a winch-capable steel bumper with upgraded foglights and beadlock-capable wheels, as well as less useful features such as graphics and a "sport bar" behind the cab with a light bar mounted on top (which, as some other journalists would later find out, liked to shake itself loose on washboard trails).

In theory, the Colorado ZR2 Desert Boss ought to be the perfect rig for what Chevy had in store for us: an adventure mirroring the Best in the Desert race course, which stretches from the outskirts of Death Valley in Beatty, Nevada, winds through the Tonopah Basin, over the Pilot Mountains, across the sand flats near Fallon, and finally down an old Pony Express route toward our finish line on the outskirts of Carson City. Leading our convoy of Colorado ZR2s and ZR2 Desert Bosses on our venture would be Chad Hall, son of off-road racing legend Rod Hall and respected off-road racer in his own right, piloting his lightly modified race-prepped 2023 Colorado ZR2.

Loaded up in our Glacier Blue metallic Colorado ZR2 Desert Boss, our convoy set off to cover the 120-mile highway journey from the Las Vegas border to Beatty. The pavement gave us a chance to take stock of the new Colorado ZR2. Like the old truck, the new one is a treat on the road. The new engine blends the top-end horsepower of the previous V-6 with the diesel's low-end grunt, resulting in a meaty powerband and plenty of passing power. The eight-speed likes to get into higher gears, but the four-pot has so much torque and the cabin is so quiet, you could easily find yourself cruising at 90 mph without realizing it.

The Chevy's ride and handling are wonderful, too. Although steering is a touch numb on center, it loads up nicely in bends, and you don't chase the truck down the highway like you do in some of the Colorado ZR2's competitors. The DSSV dampers, unlike the Fox shocks found on most of the Colorado's rivals, are firmly tuned, resulting in less body roll and dive while cornering or braking but without sacrificing ride quality.

We were still on Highway 95, a stone's throw from the closed Department of Energy town of Mercury, when we had our first calamity: a low tire pressure warning from the front-left tire. We'd chuckled earlier in the drive when the voice of another Desert Boss driver came over the radio with two low pressure warnings, and it seemed karma had found us. This, as it turns out, would become a common theme for the trip. We couldn't find a puncture, so we swapped on a spare and continued on for our trailhead, a rocky dirt road that'd take us past the ghost town of Bonnie Clair, through the fast sandy desert washes of Montezuma valley, and spit us out over the rutted Gold mountains as we approached Tonopah, our destination for the evening.

We thumbed the truck into 4-Hi, twisted the drive mode dial into Baja mode—accurately described to us by a Chevy engineer as an "off-road sport mode" with more aggressive throttle response and reduced traction—and tapped away at the Colorado's 11.3-inch touchscreen to turn on the head- and foglights so others in our convoy could pick us out of the inevitable dust clouds we'd throw up.

Ripping across the desert at speeds that'd attract the attention of highway patrol on pavement, the Colorado ZR2 comes alive. Get on the throttle hard enough, and a "Performance Shift Active" message pops up. Cribbed from Cadillac's V cars, the setting is perfectly optimized for sporty driving—it holds gears to redline, downshifts under braking, and keeps the turbo-four on boil.

The ZR2's chassis is even better. The new DSSV dampers are nearly impossible to upset. Impacts are registered but isolated; dispatched without upsetting the occupants in the cabin or (more important) the four tires slinging sand beneath you. The chassis is so well balanced, we often found ourselves trail-braking and Scandi-flicking the Colorado into corners, laying on the throttle to power out. And yes, we know what you're thinking—you'll never quite reach space, but the ZR2 jumps (and more important lands) quite well.

The next day brought both a new and old challenge to our Colorado ZR2 Desert Boss. We started our morning with our two rear tires leaking air. Our Desert Boss was far from the only one affected. In speaking with the Chevy team, we discovered that either due to a bad batch of tire valves, shoddy dealer installations, or a potential design flaw with its unique wheels, the Desert Boss' tires tended to, uh, air themselves down. By the time we'd aired back up at a local gas station, the group had left us for the day's trailhead. We'd end the day on our final spare tire, the handsome-looking full-size steelie stashed under the bed. We weren't the only ones. Notably the non-Desert Boss ZR2s, which have a different wheel, appeared immune from this issue.

We'd long since caught up to the group by the time we reached our second challenge, about 2,000 feet shy of Pilot Peak's summit: snow. Knee deep and the consistency of a perfect snowball, our convoy of Colorado ZR2s ground to a halt midway through the spring snowline. The trucks were handling the slushy stuff just fine, but given a lack of recovery gear among our group—our support rig was miles back down the mountain still picking its way among rocks—Hall decided to scout out the summit in his race truck. He made it a few hundred yards down the trail until he ground to a halt and had to be shoveled free. Despite the combined confidence of the assembled journalists, we turned our Colorados back down the mountain, taking a different trail toward our overnight in Fallon.

After spending the end of the previous day crawling our way over rocks on the outskirts of Fallon in Terrain mode—which when engaged in low range convincingly mimics off-road EVs like the Rivian R1T by offering one-pedal driving—we were looking forward to spending our last day bombing across dunes, down washes, and up and over undulating hills as we sprinted to our finish near Carson City.

After two days in which we'd covered nearly 300 miles off-road, it was easy to get lulled into a routine on the undulating terrain—accelerate hard on the straights, usually to highway speeds, staying just shy of the dust clouds coming from the Colorados ahead, lift off to unload the suspension prior to cresting an obstacle or a G-out, fly over it, and hammer down again.

With the sun rising behind us as we headed west and the desert floor a thousand shades of tan, we didn't see the square-cut ditch until it was right off our nose. Hard on the brakes, off right before we hit the tire-sized trench, and a crashing "BANG!" filled the cabin as we blasted through the obstacle. Our dashboard lit up as we continued across to the other side. "Service Power Steering Drive With Care," and "Service ESC" warning lights flashed from the dash.

We pulled over and shut down the truck, sure to find catastrophic damage. Shockingly, the truck was completely fine. The front driver's side tire tucked itself into the wheelwell, damaging the felt liner—a common occurrence in off-roaders with high-travel suspensions—but it was no worse for wear. We fired the truck back up, and the error messages had cleared (a few other trucks in our group reported similar self-clearing errors after hard hits). We fingered Baja mode back on, put our foot down, and chased the rooster tails ahead of us leading toward the finish. These are some tough trucks.

Although the Desert Boss add-ons disappointed (save the $9,990 and buy a standard ZR2 for $48,295—or just wait on the Bison instead), overall, the new 2023 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 more than lives up to the promises made on the tin. It is an off-road jack of all trades. Unlike many of its competitors, the Chevy is just as happy crawling over rocks at a walking pace as it is ripping across a dry lakebed at a race pace. The latter is no exaggeration—Hall would later tell us that our group of amateurs in stock Colorado ZR2s averaged just 5 mph shy of race pace on the trail.

Over 794 miles behind the wheel, 350 of which were off-road, the Colorado ZR2 proved itself to be a remarkably well rounded eating up miles of rural American highway and small-town roads. It's comfortable, quiet, and though smaller inside than the truck it replaces, still roomy enough for everyday use. Therefore, this rig is perfectly suited to not just the adventures we think we'll take—don't you go bombing across the desert with racing legends every weekend?—but to the adventures we actually take.