Chevrolet Colorado

From Classic Car Life

The Chevrolet Colorado and its counterpart, the GMC Canyon, are General Motors' mid-size pickup trucks introduced in 2004 to replace the compact pickup Chevrolet S-10 and GMC Sonoma. Template:Isuzu, which participated in the design of the truck, began selling its own version in late 2005, named the "i-Series". The Chevrolet Colorado was jointly designed by GM's North American operations, GM's Brazil operations, and Isuzu, based on the GMT355, itself the basis for the GMT 345-based Hummer H3. The vehicles are manufactured and produced at a GM plant in Rayong, Thailand, and in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Colorado/Canyon offer both manual and automatic transmissions. GM also offers either a rear-wheel drive or four-wheel drive drivetrain with standard, extended, and four-door crew cab bodystyles. Most models come with the 2,770 cc (2.77 L; 169 cu in) LK5 I4 engine as standard, but a more powerful 3,460 cc (3.46 L; 211 cu in) L52 Straight-5 comes with the Z71 package on 4-door versions and is optional on all others. The 4-door Z71s also get the 4-speed automatic transmission standard. This package was later dropped in favor of LT2 and LT3.

A ZQ8 edition is available with a lower and more road-tuned "sport" suspension than the standard Z85 and comes with 17 inch wheels, color-matched bumper and grille, and low profile fender flares. There is also a Xtreme edition of the ZQ8 which has a different front bumper, rear bumper, side skirts, fender flares, grille, headlights, and 18 inch wheels. The Xtreme edition is basically a continuation of a trim package from its predecessor, the Chevrolet S-10 Colorado/Canyon U.S. sales peaked in 2005 at 163,204 units, surpassing the perennial segment leader, the Template:Ford Ranger, Template:Nissan Frontier, by almost 35% and just 3.3% behind the new best-seller, the Template:Toyota Tacoma. In 2006, however, while still leading the Ford pickup by 27.5%, Colorado/Canyon's sales lagged their Toyota competitor's by almost 34%.

Despite crew cabs being limited to LT trims which most other Chevrolet vehicles only offer front bucket seating with the trim; the LT crew cabs are the only trims of the Colorado to have 6-passenger seating (i.e. with front bench seating).Credit for this page must go to the excellent Wikipedia, the original page, can be found here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMC_Canyon