A Truck for Car Lovers
MSRP: $36,460 - $47,780
General Motors' latest line of full-size SUVs, including the GMC Yukon Denali, impresses with refinement and comfort. The question remains, how badly do you need a hefty truck that guzzles fuel?
Overview
The all-new ’07 Yukon Denali is part of General Motors’ brave new world of full-size, big-engine SUVs, which are stubbornly coming to market while gas prices continue to push past an average of $2.50 a gallon. Critics deride the troubled corporation for being out of step with the times, but GM is convinced that the market for such brutes will continue to flourish.
At 750,000 units a year, full-size SUVs account for about 4.4 percent of U.S. passenger-vehicle sales, and the theory is that there will always be plenty of buyers who feel they absolutely require the capability to carry at least half a dozen people in comfort, plus at least some baggage, while towing a big boat, travel trailer, race car or rolling livestock.
We’ll see whether GM is right, but meanwhile, there’s no denying that the Yukon Denali is an outstanding vehicle. I have no more use for a truck than I do for a walk-in refrigerator, but the Denali is so good it could change my mind.
The Yukon Denali is the best all-around, full-size SUV I’ve ever driven: luxurious, roomy, comfortable, smooth, whisper-quiet, surprisingly car-like, and at 380 hp, more powerful than anything but exotic super cars, top-tier German sedans with V12 engines and the 403-hp Cadillac Escalade with which the Yukon shares much of its makeup,
Whether it’s worth a $13,100 premium over the straight Yukon is questionable, but that considerable wad of money does buy you a new unique-to-the-Denali 6.2-liter, all-aluminum V8 engine; a new six-speed automatic transmission with a useful “manual” shift mode; a leather, luxurious interior; several nice standard power features; and some minor external embellishments such as the distinctive perforated “chrome” grille (in fact, electroplated plastic).
A 20-inch-longer Denali XL is also available, and in 2008, there will be Yukons (though not a Denali) with a two-mode hybrid system for 25 percent better fuel economy.
The salient characteristic of a full-size SUV is three rows of real seats — little third-row jump seats don’t make the cut. If you want to fly coach in a Denali, all three rows can be three-seat benches rather than bucket seats, for a total of nine passengers.
The first-class configuration would have individual seats (called “bucket seats”) all around, for a total of six, and business class might include a single bench in the middle or rearmost row, your choice.
All are relatively roomy. The third row is intended for youngsters or short-trip adult use, but it’s not the penalty box you find in some SUVs. The middle row is comfortable and spacious in every dimension, with its own set of climate controls and optional seat heaters.
There’s also an optional Panasonic DVD player with a drop-down screen for backseaters. If the shifter is in park, Dad can watch the movie on the dashboard nav-display screen while the family is at Foot Locker buying a round of new Nikes.
It’s possible to reach the rearmost seats by squirming between the two middle bucket seats, if that’s the chosen configuration, but it’s even easier to push a button on the rear roof pillar or on the driver’s overhead control panel, to make either middle seat automatically power-fold forward to allow an unobstructed clamber into the third row.
The rearmost seats manually fold forward for increased luggage space but don’t disappear into the floor, like on some SUVs and minivans. Instead, they can be removed entirely with relative ease: Each seat has a suitcase-like handle and a firm tug releases the seat from its locks so you can trundle it into the garage.
The powered and heated front seats are, of course, the thrones, amply sized for the biggest butts and with an electrically adjustable pedal cluster to compensate for short drivers. The steering wheel both tilts and telescopes manually.
All three rows of seats have side-curtain airbags that deploy from above to cushion impacts as well as guard against the deadliest of rollover dangers, the ejection of unbelted passengers from the vehicle.
It doesn’t take long to notice that the level of interior-trim refinement — the quality of the materials, the nuances of tightly seamed panels and pieces, the attention to soft-touch switchgear and detailing — is substantially higher than what you might have come to expect from GM vehicles. “We’ve finally learned how to make a black plastic interior look good, like the Europeans do,” one GMC engineer said. “Stuff like that we’ve fought with for awhile now.”
The result of the bout is apparent, and welcome.
Performance
The all-wheel-drive GMC Yukon Denali is a nearly-three-ton truck that in many respects handles like a tall, powerful car. Much of the initial engineering of the new series of full-size GM SUVs involved lowering the core structure and its center of gravity, and widening the track (the side-to-side distance between each set of wheels) for greater stability. Open the Yukon Denali’s hood and you’ll see that the big engine is mounted both low and rearward, toward the vehicle’s center of gravity with as much of it as possible below the front-seat occupants.
The new six-speed transmission makes seamless shifts, both up and down, with the tachometer needle virtually the only indication that you’ve changed gears. The transmission can be controlled manually via a shift-up/shift-down rocker switch on the column-mounted shifter stalk. It’s an odd location; such controls are usually either on the steering wheel or controlled by a console-mounted shift lever between the front seats, but it works just fine. This is hardly a sports car that demands both hands on the wheel as you drift through corners, and you’ll mainly use the manual mode while fine-tuning a trailer-towing situation.
The ’07 Yukon Denali’s nicely weighted and communicative steering is a new rack-and-pinion system instead of the previous generation’s recirculating-ball unit. Recirculating-ball steering is beefy, powerful and a bit numb, but has typically been used in trucks for exactly those reasons. Rack-and-pinion is simple and precise, providing excellent steering feel and feedback — which is why you’ll find it on Porsches, Ferraris and every other car with good-handling pretensions. Hydraulic power assist makes it adaptable to a vehicle as heavy as a Yukon Denali.
At 105 mph, where a speed limiter steps in, the Yukon Denali felt solid and stable, at least in a straight line. At an enthusiastic 60 and 70 mph on smooth, gently curving country roads, the big Yukon feels like a far smaller vehicle. At least it does until you try the brakes aggressively, which is when it becomes apparent that 5,500 pounds might stop on a silver dollar, but never a dime.
Did You Know …
• Depending on who’s doing the translating, Denali means “great one,” “high one” or “big one” in the Athabascan Indian language Dena’ina. It’s the name by which Alaska’s Mt. McKinley was originally known by Native Americans and is the name most commonly used for that mountain in Alaska today.
• One reason manufacturers are naming new models with cryptic alphanumeric designations (G6, XLR, 500) instead of names like Yukon and Denali is that virtually all the usable words are “blocked” — copyrighted. The only recourse is nonsense words (Azera, Escalade, Miata, Sentra) or letters and numbers.
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