2024 Chevy Traverse Z71 Morphs Into a Unibody Pickup Truck: Does It Stand a Chance?

For 46 years, the best-selling truck lineup in the US, the Ford F-Series, has set a high bar for everyone else to try and chase. General Motors, for example, has been doing that for decades already with the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra nameplates. But is that enough?

According to the first-half sales tally, General Motors beat Ford at the finish line for full-size pickup trucks. But that's only possible when the automaker combined Silverado and Sierra sales – both light- and heavy-duty full-size models – so the Blue Oval company still has a chance to hold the upper hand by the end of the year.

Besides, GM could have a better truck lineup out there. The 2024 Ford F-150 has best-in-class towing and payload capacity, so the Silverado and Sierra don't hold a candle to the main protagonist of the F-Series. Meanwhile, the heavy-duty truck lineup also leaves much to be desired compared to the Super Duty models – and, again, it only takes a look at the spec sheet to notice why.

So, what could GM do to address the conundrum? According to the imaginative realm of digital car content creators, they could think of tripling the light-duty full-size pickup truck roster by also creating a unibody option – much like Ford took command of the compact pickup truck sector with the unibody Maverick. And Dimas Ramadhan, the virtual automotive artist behind the Digimods DESIGN channel on YouTube, has taken up the task of revealing that potential nameplate.

The pixel master opted to morph the third-generation Chevrolet Traverse full-size crossover SUV into a good-looking pickup truck offering. The nameplate, first offered by Chevy in model year 2009 as the successor to the body-on-frame TrailBlazer SUV and the Uplander minivan, has just reached its third iteration and looks more like a truck than ever before.

So, probably that's what triggered the virtual chain of events and why the CGI expert ended up cooking a Chevy Traverse pickup truck out of a unibody crossover SUV. The model uses the GM C1XX-2 platform and now has a 2.5-liter LK0 turbocharged inline-four engine under the hood that's good for 315 horsepower and 317 lb-ft (430 Nm).

These are respectable figures, but would they be enough to conquer the world of full-size pickup trucks? Most likely, no, so we bet this will forever remain merely wishful thinking. After all, the 2024 Ford F-150, for example, has larger mills – including a V8 and hybrid. Plus, there's also the F-150 Lighting, so it's perhaps best if General Motors focused its forces on giving the 2024 Silverado EV and Sierra EV a jolt to come out to dealerships as soon as possible.