The 1996 Chevy Suburban Was a Family Car Icon of the 1990s

this is a 1996 chevy suburban and you already knew that if you're a 90s kid this was family transport back in the 90s some families had suburbans some families had dodged caravans and all the other families wished they had either a suburban or a dodge caravan today i'm going to review this old school suburban and take you on a trip back in time to family transport in the 90s [Music] before i get started big news this suburban is currently for sale being auctioned live on cars and bids which is my enthusiast car auction website this is a relic from another era and it's tremendously difficult to find one of these in nice shape anymore but this one is and it's available on cars and bids so once you finish watching this video click the link in the description below to head over to the live auction for this suburban where you can bid on it and buy it only on cars and bids but let's talk suburban chevy first started using the suburban name back in the 1930s and over the years it evolved into a popular big suv now in the 80s sales started to take off a little bit as suvs were starting to gain traction but it was this model which came out in 1992 when things really blew up i remember when i was a kid back in the 90s so many parents had these they had tons of room and big v8s but this was back when gas was cheap and frankly there weren't many fuel-efficient alternatives so many of these were used up hauling the kids to baseball practice and taking the family up to the mountains and hauling the family rv around and it's basically impossible to find one of these that survived that era but this one did and today i'm going to review it first i'll take you on a tour of this suburban and show you all of the quirks and features of this iconic 90s suv then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a doug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of the 90s suburban with getting inside and the first thing you notice in here is it's not really all that nice in fact you get into this car with a modern perspective and you think i can't believe that this was one of the standards of its day you have a lot of cheap plastic pretty much everywhere and no attempt made to class things up there's nothing nice nothing luxurious throughout this interior you have big panel gaps pretty much everywhere you look as you can see and you have these like big ugly buttons that are oversized i think for old people to press them it just doesn't look that nice but here's the thing as someone who lived through this era i can tell you the reason this interior is like this that's because nice hadn't really been invented yet when this suburban was new there was no cadillac escalade there was no lincoln navigator there was no gmc yukon denali there weren't high-end versions of family suvs it simply didn't exist if you wanted to spend big money on a family suv that just meant you were getting a bigger vehicle and not necessarily a nicer one there was a nicer trim level of this suburban the lt model but it had like leather seats that was about it bigger wheels there wasn't like a lot of luxury in this segment at the time this was how family cars were back in the 90s and this stuff was all just sort of taken as normal and to be honest you got to give general motors some credit in this interior because there are quite a few clever little details hidden all throughout this interior which i will cover let's start with the center console here between the seats you can open it up and it's quite large you can stick a lot of storage items in there which is nice to have but the clever part is on the top of the center console you have this little like pad that swivels and you can flip it over and then use that to write on you can like put a notebook on there and there's even a clip at the top of the pad to keep your notebook or your legal pad or whatever in place while you're writing which is a cool feature to have a nice little clever detail and how about this this suburban has a cd player that's the cd slot right there in the center control stack it's not nice it's not well integrated it clearly wasn't designed to go with this radio it's just sort of stuck on there but that was a big deal in 1996 i remember my dad bought a new toyota camry in 1998 and got only a cassette player because he was thinking ah i don't know if cds are going to catch on just yet but back in 96 this having a cd player was a really nice feature now the drawback to this was your little center storage area here was taken up by cd storage and that meant there was no great room for cupholders which was kind of a shame in a vehicle like this you take on long drives the whole family you want a place to put cups so they hid some check this out you pull this little panel out from the dashboard and there's a cup holder there and you can slide out a second cup holder from this tiny little panel two cup holders emerge so you did have cup holders in here cleverly integrated into this little interior dashboard panel that's pretty cool and also on the dashboard check this out below the center you have a little cigarette lighter here as you might expect but there's also a couple of panels next to that cigarette lighter those are other cigarette lighter outlets you can open them up and you see you have power points here which is really nice and that's especially impressive because back in the 90s there weren't as many devices you would need to charge as there are now but the suburbans still had these power points for those devices it was actually kind of futuristic forward thinking and another clever touch adding all those power ports in front and another clever detail here is how they managed to integrate so many climate controls into this dashboard obviously the driver has one over on the driver's side and the passenger has one over on the passenger side but there are three additional climate vents beyond that just on the top part of the dashboard you can see this little vent area actually has two separate vents so you can use one to send air to the driver and the other to send air to the passenger which is a cool idea to split that vent in two and then there's another a third middle vent here over on the passenger side of the dashboard for even more airflow which again is a pretty neat little trick and there's actually a sixth vent although it's hidden it's under the steering column you can see it here and it was designed to kind of keep your lap and your legs cool while you were driving along that is a pretty nice touch and actually frankly that's a pretty smart place to put a climate vent and in terms of neat ideas in this interior the ceiling up front also had a few cool tricks you can see there's like this big panel in the ceiling starting at the back this was more cd storage this spot here was sized to fit cd cases if you ran out of room in your center console that was pretty nice to have easy access to now directly in front of that you had a sunglasses holder again sized perfectly for sunglasses so you could put them there and you wouldn't lose them now directly in front of that you have another little slot with like a button in the center that was for garage door openers and the days before home link where you could just program your garage door opener you would stick your opener in here you can see the velcro in there never been used before but you could stick it in there and then try to line up the little button on the outside with the button on your garage door opener and then when you pulled in you just press that rather than having to reach up and touch your garage door opener or have it exposed and looking ugly other cool things on this overhead center console one these dome lights are really cool because you can turn them on and then swivel them to light up exactly the area you want to see which is a nice little touch you can kind of move them wherever you want and the other neat thing here is the rear climate controls very easy access to control the rear climate controls you can turn it on off change the airflow change where the air is coming and change the air temperature all within easy reach of the driver's seat up here that's pretty cool and another nice feature up here in front is the seats this car has power operated seats which was pretty rare in like a traditional family hauler from this era but you can see power seats and they adjust many different ways up down backrest even power lumbar support all of which was a pretty nice touch in a vehicle like this now like i said there was also a higher end model which had leather seats as well and i think even heated leather seats but this one the ls version got power seats and that was pretty nice now other interesting items appear one is the owner's manual right here in the glove box you pop this open and that's your owner's manual nothing too unusual or special or weird there except this car had different maintenance schedules depending on whether you were doing city driving or highway driving you can see different like intervals to do oil and fluid changes depending on what you're doing i guess you would just sort of decide oh i'm doing more highway driving so i'll follow the highway maintenance schedule or city driving kind of interesting never seen two different maintenance schedules in an owner's manual before and allowed you to like pick a preference for which one more suited you're driving also interesting with this car speaking of the owner's manual the glovebox area you can see there is no passenger airbag in this suburban it's not over here that's because this is a 1996 model and the us government didn't mandate dual front airbags until 1998 and apparently chevy waited as long as they could to comply with that mandate now the government did mandate driver airbags beginning in 95 so this has one and you can see they refer to it as chevrolet supplemental inflatable restraint rather than just saying airbag like modern cars do back then airbags were still like uncharted territory most consumers didn't know what they were and that's what they were calling it supplemental inflatable restraint interesting to see that printed there on the steering wheel instead of just airbag and next up we move on to the back seat in the 90s suburban which frankly was a lot of the reason why people bought these for the rear seat and all the interior room and so there's a lot of notable stuff back here for one thing you have a full-sized door in the back in this vehicle most rear doors in most vehicles curve around the wheel arch but not this one the suburban was so big they didn't have to bother with that and you have a full door that goes all the way down straight to the bottom of the vehicle which made entry and exit pretty easy but anyway getting inside you open up the massive door and of course you just climb in and the first thing you notice back here is rear seat room is pretty big even with this front seat pretty far back i've got good space back here where i can sit good head room decent leg room there's a lot of space in the back of this suv that was the point it was huge to carry your whole family and more than just offering a roomy back seat the suburban had some nice clever details back here that made it a comfortable and convenient place to spend time i'm gonna start with the rear climate controls you can see the controls again right here easy reach of the rear seat passengers in the back seat on the ceiling and you have climate vents on both sides of those controls you can see two climate vents on each side which got the rear area in this car heated or cooled pretty quickly and you had more climate vents on the sides above the windows also on the ceiling so there was a lot of climate vent climate control air that could be blown on the rear passengers to heat them up or cool them down and another nice touch back here feature i liked up in front the swiveling dome lights are also back here you can see them in this little panel you press and then you can swivel so even rear passengers have the ability to position the dome light exactly where they want to make it easier to see what they're doing which is pretty cool you also have a nice little hidden storage area back here you can see in the back of the front center console you pull this out it's actually a fairly large area where you can store stuff which is nice to have and hidden cup holders make a reappearance back here too you pull on this little tab and then cupholders pop out 90s cars weren't all about cup holders like modern ones are so seeing these in here that's a pretty nice feature to have and by the way if those hidden cup holders weren't enough back here there were still more cup holders in the second row you could fold down your center armrest here and you can see cupholders and also this little opening in the center that was for tissues you would take the tissues out of the tissue box and you could stick them in here and then you had a built-in tissue box in the back seat in your suburban which again was a pretty clever touch but the cleverest part about the rear seats in the 90s suburban was probably accessing the rearer seats the third row now this was not the first suv to have three row seating but before this accessing the third row seats was usually pretty cumbersome you typically had to fold the entire second row forward like the bottom part and then the backrest fold it forward before you could get into the third row and it wasn't easy and it also meant if you had a car seat back there a stuff in the second row you had to remove all that before you could even get into the third row well chevy made it easy with this suburban you can see on the side it printed the easy entry and you press this button and then push the seat forward that's what it tells you to do and indeed that's all you do press the button and then kind of heave the seat forward and it folds and then clears out of the way and clears a space into the third row making for easy third row seat entry this is not anything that's interesting by modern standards in today's cars you push one button the seat folds forward you don't even think about it but back then this was groundbreaking especially in an suv easy third row entrance and that's one of the big reasons people loved these and bought these now there is one drawback to this third row easy entry system that is it's only on the passenger side of the suburban just like a lot of minivans from this era only had a sliding door on the passenger side they figured that kids would be getting in from the sidewalk rather than like the street side and there's less room behind the driver anyway so this feature is only on the passenger side getting into the third row but it was a step forward and of course modern cars have evolved it and made it even easier now with that said if you didn't want to fold down the second row of seats that was pretty easy too you just pull this little loop on the seat bottom and then push that part forward and then the same latch you use for the easy entry system you can just press that and fold the backrest forward and then the seat was folded down over here and of course you did the same thing over on the other side and your second row was folded down just in case you did want to fold them down for more space or more cargo space or whatever it was still pretty easy to do by the way one other interesting item about the second row seats when they're folded down you can see there's a little gap behind the seats like a little depression which is the foot well for the third row seats but it also means if you fold down the seats you don't have a flat load floor so there are these little panels on the back of the second row seats you can fold them out behind the seats and create a flat load floor just in case you're loading like plywood or something that you don't want to bend in the center you don't want to risk breaking you can create that flat load floor with the second row down that's a neat little trick but anyway next up i'm in the third row in the 90s suburban and i gotta say it is pretty roomy back here the second row was pretty roomy the third row also pretty roomy surprisingly so even adults could sit back here not tremendously comfortable but there is enough space another nice convenience back here is that you have ashtrays dual ashtrays in fact so that your third row passengers almost certainly children could smoke while you were driving them along you also have ashtrays in the second row on the door panels you can see individual ashraes on the driver and passenger rear doors for your second row passengers to smoke as well the 90s were clearly a different time now not much interesting back here in the third row although third row passengers did have their own climate vents against several climate vents on the ceiling which cooled down or heated up the third row easily that was a nice feature to have third row passengers also have their own swivelly lights once again you can see a little panel of these swively lights installed back here so third row passengers can light up whatever they want when they're sitting in back too another cool feature and one more cool feature back here you have three seat belts you can see three seats across in the third row and you also had three seats across in the second row and of course two seats up front so this could seat eight people which is pretty good most modern family suvs have second row captains chairs and so they only seat seven and some only seat six but this seated eight you could bring your whole family along and some friends but a big benefit of the suburban wasn't just that it had massive passenger room but also it had massive cargo room you can see tons of cargo storage space back here even with the third row fully in place there's a lot of space behind the third row you want to take your kids and their friends and all their hockey gear in one vehicle well the suburban could do it and a minivan couldn't minivans usually didn't have any space behind the third row or very little space but this had a big advantage over a minivan all that passenger room and all that cargo storage room it was really a pretty crazy sight and in fact there's so much room back here you can see the spare tire is mounted in the cargo area and it doesn't really take up all that much space partially because tires and wheels were smaller in the 90s but also because there's just so much space back here the tire doesn't really intrude now if you wanted even more space you could fold down the third row of seats and you could even remove the third row if you wanted to but frankly you didn't often need to because there was just so much space even with the third row in place and it was good that you didn't often need to access the third row in order to fold it down because frankly it was pretty difficult to get back there mostly due to the tailgate design you can see this is a split tailgate there's an upper portion and a lower portion and the lower part kind of makes it difficult to reach in and access the third row at all but this is how it was designed and the operation was kind of interesting if you wanted to close the tailgate you just closed the bottom part first then the upper half which was the glass and then it was closed but if you wanted to open it you had two options one there was a little button inside the interior on the dashboard that let you pop open just the glass you press that and then you could come back here and open up the glass or you could stick your key in the back here twist it and then that would release the glass you would lift the glass first and then you would lift the lower half which was the tailgate and that's how it opened this split tailgate design there were drawbacks and benefits to this i already showed you the drawback reaching in here can be kind of difficult but the benefit was that you could open the glass without opening the entire rear tailgate if you just wanted to throw in some small item also a benefit you could sit on the tailgate portion it was carpeted it supported your weight and then you could sit back here and kind of use this for tailgating at a sporting event or just sitting if you were waiting for kids after school or whatever you might do now interestingly this suburban was never offered with a traditional lifting tailgate like you see in most suvs today instead you had two choices there was this which was most popular or you could get two opening rear doors back here like individual rear doors that would open up as you can see and those were your two choices for tailgates in the back of the suburban and next up we move under the hood in the suburban you can see the engine 5.7 liter v8 naturally aspirated there was no turbo charging there was no hybrid there was no cylinder deactivation there was no stop start at traffic lights you just got a big honkin v8 now when these came out in 92 this v8 had about 200 horsepower not that much although by 96 this model year was up to about 250 horsepower and 330 pound-feet of torque again not huge numbers but it's also way less than today's big suvs and it was physically smaller and people just had different standards back then frankly now interestingly there were two other engine options in this suburban one was a turbo diesel v8 with like 385 pound-feet of torque or you could step up to a 7.4 liter gas-powered v8 absolutely massive engine it maxed out around 400 pound-feet of torque if you were really pulling big stuff towing and hauling that was the engine that you wanted but truthfully those other engines are pretty rare i would speculate about 90 percent of suburban models had this engine the 5.7 liter v8 it really powered these and a lot of other general motors vehicles at the time fuel economy was not a strong suit 12 miles per gallon city and 16 miles per gallon highway and it's crazy to think about so many parents driving around the suburbs getting such bad gas mileage back then but at the time gas was cheap and frankly there weren't a lot of other alternatives if you wanted to bring the whole family and especially not a lot of alternatives that could do everything that this could do the explorer got better gas mileage but it didn't have the seats and a chrysler minivan had the seats but it didn't have the towing capacity or the cargo space this could do it all it just wasn't very efficient at doing it finally last thing i want to cover here is the styling i love how these trucks look i have generally liked the look of the full-size general motors suvs for the last 30 years they've all been pretty nice but this one i feel was the nicest of them a very clean simple boxy square design tremendously distinctive clear what it was and it's always looked good and it's aging well even 30 years later i think this is the best looking suburban of all time not necessarily the best suburban because they've gotten pretty nice as they've gone on but this was the nicest looking and the tahoe ii that was a smaller version of this and it came out in 95 they were all pretty handsome suvs they're aging very well and it's hard to find such a nice one now that represents how it looked but this one does and so those are the quirks and features of the 1990s chevy suburban now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the big old suburban i swear that everybody who's my age either grew up in one of these or you know grew up knowing someone who had one of these and then that person was kind of the envy of the other parents i grew up in an isuzu rodeo we did not have a suburb and we couldn't afford it but they were ubiquitous at the time and i remember riding in a zillion of these and even though i didn't possess one i'm still so nostalgic for like this era and this vehicle which was such a common kid hauler back then so let's talk suburban uh first thing when you get in this car your first impressions are once again the interior's just not all that nice but i really do want to make the point that that was the norm back then and it wasn't because gm was crappy they they were but that wasn't the reason it was so bad like toyotas were also pretty crappy back then i did a forerunner from this era and it was also it just wasn't luxury wasn't really the thing people weren't really pursuing that they wanted durability they wanted a lot of seats they didn't want to spend a ton of money now your other impression the other first impression when you drive this is performance is lacking this was a hefty vehicle with a big you know powertrain it was fine it was adequate and for the time it was normal cars were just slower back then but it certainly wasn't like a high performance engine or a powerful engine or a fast engine but this delivered in all the key ways that's the really big thing about this there was a lot of interior room i'm sitting up here i got like a foot i got so much space with my head i got a ton of room for my legs my knees you could sit here on a long drive while you were hauling the kids the dog all the stuff the rv the trailer everything you could bring with you i will say given what i know about this era and what this vehicle is it's totally great for what it was back then like it's comfortable it's roomy it has space for all your stuff it can tow and haul your trailer your boat whatever that's what it needed to do and that's what it did overall i gotta say i mean it's it's a blast from the past drive in this car it it it just these aren't around anymore in fact i was on my way to film this one and i encountered another one of these on the road in this color but the rear end was bashed in one of the doors was from a different vehicle i mean these just aren't like this anymore this one is in such nice shape and it's so amazing to to see it and to check it out and especially from someone who grew up in that area these are coming up in value and an interest in part because there's this nostalgia factor from people my age who are like those aren't around anymore but i kind of remember that and there was some some some sentimentality to it and just in general old suvs are kind of coming up in value and it's been interesting the 80s suburbans have really gone up nice examples of 80s suburbans and blazers are really desirable and i told the owner of this car i said really you ought to hang on to this for 10 more years because it's coming with a lot then as they become even rarer even harder to find in good shape um and and even more interest kind of swells around them but everybody wants these old suvs now they're really cool and it does certainly bring you back to a time and place that that is gone for a lot of people and so that's the 1990s chevy suburban it's so hard to find these anymore because they were so practical for family use that families just drove them until they were dead and so few of them survived but this one did and it's pretty nice and you can buy it on cars and bids anyway now it's time to give this suburban a doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling these are handsome suvs and it gets a six out of ten which is strong for a family suv especially from this era acceleration it certainly isn't fast and it gets a one out of ten handling fine and not unsafe but certainly not sporty or exciting in any way and it gets a two out of ten fun factors same deal this wasn't about fun it was about family transport and gets a one out of ten finally cool factor and these are becoming cool although there's still too many in rough shape to really start to be truly cool just yet once those die off in a few more years nicely preserved suburbans like this one will really elevate in coolness but for now it gets a 4 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 14 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features the suburban has a lot of necessities and a few cool innovations for the time but it's pretty basic stuff by modern standards and it gets a 2 out of 10. comfort is fine and it gets a 5 out of 10. quality is only ok these are reasonably reliable though they suffered from transmission problems this one recently had the transmission rebuilt plus the interior wasn't especially nice and it gets a 4 out of 10. practicality is huge you can use one of these for anything it falls only short of a perfect score due to gas mileage and it gets a 9 out of 10. finally value and i gotta say these just aren't huge money for what they offer which is an increasingly cool retro truck that's simultaneously a practical family hauler it gets a 7 out of 10 for a total daily score of 27 out of 50. added up in the doug score is 41 out of 100 which places it here against relevant vehicles these old-school suburbans are so cool it seems like everybody had one back then or knew someone who did and the nostalgia factor is high and i'm thrilled i had the chance to step back in time to review this one [Music] you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

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Id: 4fTA8SYA5rI

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021