"The Last Truck" - Part II

When my father was switched from his position as a Chevrolet-specific manager and put under the General Motors management umbrella in the late '90s, his job description changed almost as quickly as his automotive tastes. In less time than it took my grandfather to figure out what each little button on his Pontiac 6000's dashboard did (bad example), my father was forced to turn a general awareness of GM's other divisions into a working knowledge of their day-to-day sales operations.

My father's first few years under the GM umbrella were spent driving Pontiac Grands Prix and Bonnevilles, Oldsmobile Auroras and Bravadas, Chevrolet Tahoes and Trailblazers - in every variety known to man and the occasional Trans-Am, Z-28 or Corvette as company cars. As the years went on, those once-ubiquitous Trailblazers soon gave way to more feature-laden Tahoes. The Tahoes eventually gave way to more-upscale Envoys and Yukon Denalis. The Envoys and Yukon Denalis eventually gave way to an H2, and every Cadillac but the XLR. Today, my father would likely accept early retirement before being forced to drive anything remotely resembling "the last truck".

The buying public, my father and GM - in that order - eventually realized that buyers no longer wanted two-door Blazers, that the available hot pink and dark purple hues did the truck no favors, that everyone who wanted the knobby-tired ZR2 already had one, that the Xtreme came late to the slammed 2-door SUV party (was there ever such a party?), that the SS couldn't hold a candle to the Grand Cherokee SRT8, that the Envoy XUV was beyond laughable and that the 9-7x was what the Trailblazer should have been in the first place. None were bad trucks, and they still sold in large enough numbers to make their competitors take note, but they were accompanied by the stigma that their sales had more to do with pricing and incentives than with the vehicles themselves. By the New Millennium, my father was driving Envoys as company cars only when forced by his managers to pick vehicles from divisions whose name did not start and end with the letter C. Even then, the Envoy was never his first choice. He usually wound up driving one only as a back-up when something happened with the ordering or delivery of his regularly-scheduled vehicle.

Although half-jokingly referred to as a brand snob, the reality is that my father is not much different than the average buyer with some money to spend. The only difference is that while the buying public was introduced to better offerings from other manufacturers, my father was introduced to better offerings from within GM. The Trailblazer and Envoy tried keeping up with the times (see variants above), but the half-hearted effort always made them look like the old men in the club trying to prove that they've "still got it". GM's passenger cars and trucks have come a long way. My father heaped so much praise upon the last GMC Acadia he drove that my wife and I gave it a thorough once-over when we last saw him just to see what all the fuss was about. Full Disclosure: My father heaping praise upon a GM vehicle is not always something to be taken with more than a grain of salt - to hear him tell it, the only thing wrong with the Hummer division was that they didn't make a truck to split the difference between the H1 and H2. But I digress.

"The Last Truck" reminded me that while GM is trying to right its previous wrongs and usher in a new era in vehicle quality and competitiveness, the passing of the Trailblazer and its variants really is something to be mourned. You couldn't convince those workers in Moraine that they weren't building the best SUVs in America, just like you can't convince my father that he doesn't work for the best car company in America, just like writing this has made me realize that Chevy Blazers will forever be intertwined in more of my personal memories than any other vehicle.