Haha, this thread is off the rails with brand loyalty wars and manual vs automatic wars!!!
Funny stuff.
Back to this truck. I'm not in the market and I'm about as brand agnostic as they come. I like what I see. I had an '09 H3T right before Hummer went belly up. I kinda see the ZR2 as the much improved second coming of that truck. The H3T had the same basic layout, to it's credit, it did offer a 5 spd MT. On the other hand the H3T was under powered, certainly no diesel option, and had a low-end highway queen suspension setup. The ZR2 seems to bring back all the goodies and pair it with a much getter engine and suspension system.
Note on the suspension. In the world of dampers spool valves are the top tier of the valving systems. Most of your so-called fancy shocks that most of us would upgrade to use poppet style valves which, while great, are not at the same level as spool valves. The Multimatics may or may not prove be reliable or valved correctly but this is a big step up from your basic Fox and King offerings. Bust out your Google-foo and do a little reading. You'll see that even the shocks on the venerable Raptor pale in comparison to this technology.
Also note the towing and payload reductions are simply the result of tuning the rear spring and damper rates for compliance offroad based on an unloaded or lightly loaded bed. This is the same as with the Raptors and there's nothing stopping you from tweaking the suspension setup to your desired load. It's really no big deal guys.
I do wonder how great the small diesel will be. I've had a couple modern diesels and so far the torque is cool but they have been consistently more expensive and less reliable than their gasser counter parts. This ain't no 4BT/6BT (for better or worse) and time will tell whether it's really all that great or not.
Funny stuff.
Back to this truck. I'm not in the market and I'm about as brand agnostic as they come. I like what I see. I had an '09 H3T right before Hummer went belly up. I kinda see the ZR2 as the much improved second coming of that truck. The H3T had the same basic layout, to it's credit, it did offer a 5 spd MT. On the other hand the H3T was under powered, certainly no diesel option, and had a low-end highway queen suspension setup. The ZR2 seems to bring back all the goodies and pair it with a much getter engine and suspension system.
Note on the suspension. In the world of dampers spool valves are the top tier of the valving systems. Most of your so-called fancy shocks that most of us would upgrade to use poppet style valves which, while great, are not at the same level as spool valves. The Multimatics may or may not prove be reliable or valved correctly but this is a big step up from your basic Fox and King offerings. Bust out your Google-foo and do a little reading. You'll see that even the shocks on the venerable Raptor pale in comparison to this technology.
Also note the towing and payload reductions are simply the result of tuning the rear spring and damper rates for compliance offroad based on an unloaded or lightly loaded bed. This is the same as with the Raptors and there's nothing stopping you from tweaking the suspension setup to your desired load. It's really no big deal guys.
I do wonder how great the small diesel will be. I've had a couple modern diesels and so far the torque is cool but they have been consistently more expensive and less reliable than their gasser counter parts. This ain't no 4BT/6BT (for better or worse) and time will tell whether it's really all that great or not.
