General Motors makes one of the best diesel powertrains on the market, and its showcased here in this Sierra 3.0 Duramax. It gets excellent fuel economy, but you will have to deal with the complex emissions equipment. The Chevy Silverado Trail Boss diesel should be similar to this.
Both ram and general motors produce diesel 1500 trucks with the promise that people can get good fuel economy good towing abilities and decent power all in a somewhat affordable package today we’re going to take the sierra out and see how good it can do on that promise in today’s test we’re going to head out and do 50 miles out and 50 miles back averaging 70
Miles per hour to get a realistic highway fuel economy number for this diesel sierra before we get started stop out take a look at it now unfortunately this isn’t actually going to be the best truck for fuel economy testing because it is an at4 package meaning it’s got a one inch lift right from the factory and some navi all-terrain goodyear wrangler tires but
It’ll still be interesting to see what sort of fuel economy numbers we do get and if you get a more pedestrian trim the spec of a sierra diesel or silverado diesel then you can probably expect even better numbers than this so if you do want to see more on this really cool truck check the links in the description we’ve got a review of the bose audio system a dm test
Drive a little bit of live drive coverage all good things so why do we do this test well the epa’s highway fuel economy test which gives this truck 23 miles per gallon that test only averages 48 miles per hour we know there are people who take their trucks on long road trips and would like to know what sort of numbers you can realistically expect in the real world
Bigger vehicles have more air resistance to fight and that number goes up exponentially as you get going faster so in theory the highway numbers are always going to be a little bit lower in the real world than you see on the epa test because that epa test like i said is only averaging 48 miles per hour so in order to test that out we’re going to go over here fill
Up head out do 100 miles come back fill up at the same pump using the same three-click fueling method and get a result a few things to note for today outside temperature is not visible apparently because i’ve got apple carplay up what a what a poor design that you can’t see your outside temperature with carplay um it’s warm though it’s like 48 degrees let me see
How do i go out oh probably this home button 49 degrees fahrenheit tire pressures have been set to their door placard psi cold diesel pump is right here huh okay and we’re gonna have our climate control set at 73 degrees auto i guess this might use the condenser a little bit but that’s how people travel in the real world and without it we would roast all right
Let’s hop out and fill it up all right we ended up putting in 4.011 gallons for our first fill before we actually start the car we’re going to reset our trip computer and the gps and we’re ready to begin a few different drive modes here in the sierra we’ve got just actually normal sport and off-road we’re gonna be doing this test in normal and just two-wheel
Drive mode we’re gonna take it nice and easy over the highway it’s about half a mile away and pick up the test from there the goal of this test isn’t a hyper mile we’re not trying to get the best possible fuel economy numbers but rather a realistic number for this truck in order to do that we’re going to get up to highway speed at a reasonable pace and set our
Cruise control at a gps indicated 72 miles per hour that should allow us to average 70 over the whole test plenty of torque from this inline six we’ll get up to speed no problem especially with 10 different gears now this toyota echo might actually have a little bit more trouble so we’re going to kindly go around him give him some extra space a little bit of
Wind today but fortunately we go out and back in the opposite direction so that should negate the wind it looks like the speedometer on the car is very accurate with the gps well actually i take that back because it says we’re doing 73 now there we go well yeah it’s about one over so i’m gonna have to set the cruise at 73 and we’re gonna do 72. official highway
Observations you do hear some tire noise from these wranglers you hear a little bit of engine noise as well but we are on an incline and a little bit of wind noise so but like i said it’s pretty windy today we’ll catch up with you at the end kind of report back and how this thing is on the highway see what sort of fuel economy we’re getting coming into the
End of the highway fuel economy test here in the sierra at4 diesel can’t get much more on the dot than that they’re 23.2 according to the vehicle’s trip computer it’s actually a little bit better i suppose than the epa’s 23. that should get a little bit better even as we get down this hill here and get off the highway overall pretty decent highway cruiser i know
A lot of people have talked about the seats in this new generation truck and yes they are a little bit firm and i guess now that i think about a little bit more my butt’s a little bit more sore than it might be in comparable vehicles but other than that this thing’s comfortable it’s got a good place for my elbows it’s you know it’d be a little bit quieter with
Some normal tires but i did realize that there’s actually a separate um mpg figure in the epa’s calculations for the non-at4 model so if this were not an at4 it’d be estimated at 26 mpg highway so i am glad that they rated this one separately because of the tires and the lift so keep that in mind that if we do indeed get 23 miles per gallon here then you might be
Able to see 26 miles per gallon if you got a non-at4 model which is pretty darn good for a truck of this size and capacity another thing that we’ve started doing is measuring the temperature inside here because we have the climate control set at 73 but what does that really come out to certain vehicles we roast and this truck did get up to 75 degrees fahrenheit
In here even though the climate control set at 73 it didn’t feel that warm however when i was recording the sound system test for this truck my camera overheated unfortunately so i had to turn the climate control down a little bit blow some cool air over the camera and that dropped it down to 72 but it’s going back up i bet you would get back up to at least 75 again
Something to keep in mind we’re going to take it nice and easy back to the gas station fill up see what we get 4.125 gallons going in for our final fill 102.2 divided by 4.125 has given us that’s uh that’s a little bit high of a fill i think um i i yeah it’s possible i i think a safe number would probably be to round that down to 24 miles per gallon because epa’s
23 car sand 23.4 this saying 24.7 i think 24 miles per gallon pretty safe number and that’s pretty darn cool for a vehicle this capable off-road this size and this capable and towing now we don’t 100 know what fuel tank is in here it’s it’s tough with pickup trucks i’ve got a lot of different fuel tank sizes i think this might be 24 but i also think we might have
Some sort of extended tank in here if it is 24 then 24 gallons times 24 mpg is giving you an effective highway cruising range and 570 miles here in the at4 diesel sierra so thank you all so much for watching if you do want to see more on this truck check the links in the description we’ve got the great bose sound system test live drive dm test drive all the good
Stuff and we’ll see on the next one i’m charlie from daily motor and as always drive on
Transcribed from video
2022 GMC Sierra 1500 AT4 Duramax Diesel – MPG Test | Real-world Highway Range and Fuel Economy By Daily Motor