First Impressions

In no particular order, as of 8/18/24:

These are my first impressions after a month and a half of ownership of my Silverado EV RST First Edition and after two long road trips, one towing. 

Good Things: 

• Leg room: Back seat leg room: Loads of room in the back seat. Not a great picture of the vast space, but trust me, it’s copious!

  

• Comfort: The seats are super comfortable. 
• Storage: Lots of fun storage compartments and great cupholders.
• Efficiency: We are getting 1.8 kW/mi. while not towing. Pretty good for such a heavy truck. DC charging is quick on a 350kW charger.
• Lock the dropdown of tailgate: The small “step” portion of the tailgate can get dented if you drop it down with your hitch in the receiver. To prevent dents, you can lock the multi-function tailgate so it doesn’t open and the tailgate only opens like a conventional one. Now you can’t accidentally drop it down on the hitch and dent it. We try to remember to do this every time we put a hitch into the receiver.
• AC while locked: The “Keep climate hack.” There is no “Pet Mode” but there is a hack to keep the car on with no time limit. Pump the accelerator 3 times and tap the brake. That overrides the 1-hour shut-off and leaves the car, and if you want, the AC running indefinitely or as long as the battery lasts. The doors can be locked. We are still experimenting with this one and don’t fully trust it with our pooch, especially while DC fast-charging.
• Remote Climate Control: You can control climate from your phone, but it is a little fiddly to figure out and it only works with remote start.
• 4-wheel steering: This is AMAZING!
• Quiet: The cabin is very quiet. No rattles, no squeaks. We had some road noise at first, but that went away as the tires wore in. 
• SuperCruise: SuperCruise has been very good. If set, it will change lanes and then take you back out of the fast lane when there is room. It stays in its lane nicely and it even works while towing! It feels reliable. It’s not Tesla FSD, but Grandpa-EV and I both like to drive and this is as much control as we want to give up. It’s great for eating in the car while driving on a road trip.
• Baby car seats! I don’t know how other trucks attach baby seats but because the RST seats fold down, you can easily access the anchor points behind the seat. 3 car seats would be no problem across the back or 2 seats and an adult. This is important to us grandparents with 3 grandbabies under 2 years old. Below is one of two car seats installed in anticipation of a visit from our Canadian daughter and her fam. The second car seat will come on the plane with them.
  

  

• Midgate: Here is a picture of us hauling a 4×8′ sheet of peg board. We sometimes haul the same size sheetrock or plywood. With the midgate down it fit under the tonneau with the tailgate up, and lots of room to spare.
  
  Looking in from the tailgate, under the tonneau with the midgate open, back seats down.

Bad Things: 

• No Back Seat Climate Control: There are vents in the center back that the back seat passengers can direct, but there are no other controls. This seems odd as almost all cars now have climate controls for the backseat passengers. You can turn on/off the heated seats. But no climate controls or climate zone for the back seat. It seems for a $96K vehicle, you could give them a zone. My old 2006 Toyota Sequoia had a back seat and 3rd-row climate zone. The backseat passengers could control their temperature. Seems like a basic need.
•  Sirius Ads: Sirius XM ads were frequent and on top of other audio at first but we got this to stop.
• The pedestrian warning sound: is loud and annoying. It can be heard in the cabin.
  Hear it here, compared to my Bolt EV.
• Glass Roof: I do not see the appeal of the glass roof. I kinda hate it. Who wants the sun beating in on their heads all the time, or on the truck’s interior while it’s parked outside? This just seems like asking for your seats to deteriorate! It makes the cabin hot. I never really look out of it. I had a sunroof in my last big vehicle. It had a shade that could slide closed or you could open it to be a window, or full retract it to be open to the air. WE NEVER USED IT.

  There really doesn’t seem to be a way to put a sunshade on this giant piece of roof glass. If they make a sunshade, I will buy it and likely never take it off. 

• No adaptive audio Volume: The manual talks about this on the Bose Sound System on page 154 of the owner’s manual. They call it Bose AudioPilot. It does say “If equipped” but the RST First Editon is supposed to be fully optioned. There was no way to get a better sound system. Why mention it if it doesn’t exist? This seems odd. Here is a screenshot from the PDF manual. I really want this feature but there is no path to get it. Maybe it will come in an update? One can only hope.
  
    
• SuperCruise jerky on sharper turns: SuperCruise is a little wonky on twisy roads. We got steering wheel oscillations and some big, sharp jerks that made us take back control. It felt like it was turning in discrete steps instead of a smooth curve. Hard to explain but it reminds me of graphing equations. 
• Black: Really? No choice of colors. They teased us with the vivid blue color in all the promos, then the blue-gray color was advertised. All good, but when it came time to order, “…any color as long as it is black (Henry Ford about the model T)”. Really GM? Then months later, white could be ordered. YUCK. Give me color!
• No Pet Mode, No Camp Mode: Like Pet mode, camp mode should keep the climate on while turning off all the screens. It should also attempt to level the vehicle with the air suspension system. We may want to camp in the truck with the midgate down, partially under the tonneau. 
  
• GM mismanaging the reservation list: I’ll likely make an entire post about this and then link it here. But in brief, We bought an RST, not on our order, on July 4th. Our ordered truck has still not arrived by this mid-August writing. WTF!?
• MyChevrolet App: Everyone agrees that this needs improvements. Not the worst software out there, but a long way from the lofty Tesla benchmark. I hope there will be updates. 
• Google Maps Trip planning: While not bad one charge stop at a time, we had a hard time planning a 600-mile route with 3 charge stops. Some of this might be user-error, though we are both computer geeks and we worked hard and researched long to get this right. Google kept sending us to a 40kW charger that would take 4+ hours to charge when 20 miles sooner we could charge for 45 minutes at a 350kW. So, this wasn’t as smooth as one would like. We had to manually plan and cross-check chargers for availability, reliability rating and service issues using ABRP and Plug Share. We don’t mind manual planning, but those days should be in the past. Hey, GM – let’s get coding already!

Phyical problems & trips to the service department:

1. 

   Missing grab handle: in bed. All RSTs should come with a tailgate step grab handle that swings up to help you climb in. Virtually all RSTs, as far as I have heard, have shipped without this item. I had to rally hard with my dealer to get it ordered and installed. I love it. If you have an RST, you should rally your dealer too. (Please excuse the very dirty tonneau cover in this picture. We had just gotten back from a road trip.
   UPDATE: Evidently, I may have been the only RST owner to get a free grab handle. According to stevedw on the Silverado EV forum (see original post) GM has published a clarification that this part is not included.
2. Missing molding on the roof:  On the passenger side, along the top of the back door, there was a trim piece that was completely missing.  We didn’t

   

   see this at first as you have to really step up into the doorway to see it. The similar piece on the other side was and continues lifting up and catching air. We were able to snap that side back down, but then it pops up again. We have no idea if our truck was shipped without this piece or if it flew off while we were driving? It is going in next week to get the missing piece installed and we will ask about the other side too.
3. Paint flaws: We have a couple of small areas on the edge of doors and such that are nicked. The dealer is supposed to be getting us some touch-up paint. So far that has come through. Also, we have what looks like buffer marks, maybe from where they cleaned it up when it came in? Not sure if those will polish out or if they are scratches.
4. Tire Pressure Sensors: Our tire pressure sensors didn’t register with the car. There is a button to “learn the tire pressure” but repeated running of that didn’t help. We were getting lots of warnings of low pressure. The service department had to calibrate the system so the tire pressure sensors started to behave.

5. 

   Soft tonneau delay: The truck shipped without the tonneau, which was on backorder. We had to take it in to have the dealer install it. It came about 3 weeks after we got the truck. This was inconvenient on our first road trip where we towed our sailboat to the High Sierra Regatta at Huntington Lake, CA.
6. Mirror Motor: After about 3 days the passenger mirror had a folding problem. The motor would fold in but wouldn’t stop trying to fold, It would whirr and click and jerk a bit. Fortunately,  you could make if fold back out. The dealer had to replace the entire mirror. Someone else on the Silverado EV Forum reported this problem also.

Today is Sunday, August 18, 2024. I want to get this posted, however, I feel like I have missed lots of stuff. I’ll update the post if more comes to mind. Updates will be cited at the top of this post

So, I’ll end, this post about the “newness,” of our truck with this picture that symbolizes the end of being brand new. The California DMV was VERY quick to get us our license plates, which is surprising as they are usually slow with regular registration. We were surprised that they came as commercial plates. Someone told us that it’s because of the truck’s weight.

This makes me a little sad because it feels like the truck has gotten old? Grown up? Is less new?. Silly, I know.

Grandpa-EV wanted this new custom license plate frame with text in his favorite color, red! Be sure to say, “Hi!” if you see us at a charger!

Drive clean! 

Grandma-EV