I looked into both of these issues for obvious reasons. The curtain airbags going off in less than rollover situations off road scenarios appears to have been a sensor threshold issue. Essentially, it's a predictive system versus a responsive one. With the regular air bags, deployment occurs when a sensor detects an impact. The curtain air bags deploy for that reason OR if it thinks the truck is about to roll. In that event, it must deploy prior to the roll or, I believe, it'll have a damage multiplying effect. For that reason, the sensors are looking for things like speed, steering angle, and most critically the lateral angle of the truck relative to the ground. I believe it was this latter threshold they needed to reduce, but I imagine the others got attention too. Explanation aside, it was an easy dealer flash sort of fix, and it's gone and done unless your truck is old enough to have been affected and hasn't been to a dealer (or you have a crappy dealer) since the patch was issued.
The frame thing... For all the talk of the ZR2 being Chevy's answer to the Raptor, I honestly expected to see more of this. Through another lens, it could easily be considered a good sign for the strength of the frame that we're not seeing more of it. Hell, the GM PR team was literally instructing automotive journalists to jump the thing! This particular instance was abuse, plain and simple. This is hearsay for lack of availability of direct knowledge by incident or design, so pass it through a filter, but from what I was able to gather the guy with the trailer did a dumb thing, then tried to make his own media blitz to get Chevy to fix it. His insurance didn't cover it either (no filter there, his own admission, but much less publicized). I have not verified this, but it comports with expectations, he seems to be quite a "bro", hanging out with a bunch of other bros, many of whom drive and were driving Raptors. He wanted to play too, tried too hard, and the result was very predictable. I could be wrong, but for everything I was able to find on the incident and the individual, that was the case. It's the only one I've seen, but it looks like there may be other cases I'm not aware of that could change my tune. I can always be swayed by evidence.
Regardless, from a frame perspective, I don't recall the construction or materials of the Gladiator frame off hand, but the Tacoma frame is plain steel C-channel with a few boxed sections (that seems to be having rust issues AGAIN in this generation). The Colorado is HSS and fully boxed from the factory. You won't see see Gladiators having this problem because they're meant to be driven slowly, and that's a different kind of stress on the frame. The Tacoma wont see issues like that because Toyota is too damn lazy to give us anything good worth doing anything exciting with (a fake snorkel and even more fake hood scoop do NOT qualify as good...). Chevy took a chance, and to be fair, Ford did it first. I've been saying for years that for all of Chrysler's quality issues, they're at least giving us exciting cars left right and center. Chevy has finally seen the light, and I'm stoked for it. As we near the end of the reign of the internal combustion engine, I suspect we'll see quite a few exciting options at this zenith.[/I][/I]
