The Chevy Tahoe Hybrid Was a Truly Terrible SUV

this is a 2008 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid and it was an attempt at a hybrid SUV it just wasn't a very good attempt and today I'm going to show you what I mean now first off I should mention that I've rented this Chevy Tahoe Hybrid using Toro which is this cool business that lets you rent other people's cool and interesting cars instead of your typical boring airport rental cars you can click the link below to sign up for Toro and you'll get $25 off your first Toro rental but let's talk about the Tahoe Hybrid now the Tahoe Hybrid made its debut for the 2008 model year this is a 2008 model and at the time the thinking was simple gas prices were high hybrids like the Toyota Prius were really hot and the economy was starting to decline so GM figured here's a plan let's give people a hybrid like they want but not force them to get a tiny little car like the Prius basically let's let people have hybrid fuel efficiency but at the same time they can keep their big SUV unfortunately it didn't quite work out that way is I will explain shortly for now a little overview now in addition to the Tahoe Hybrid General Motors also made a GMC Yukon Hybrid and a Cadillac Escalade Hybrid and they also made hybrid versions of their pickup trucks but those are really really rare now the Tahoe Hybrid uses a 330 horsepower 6 liter v8 along with some assist from a couple of electric motors and it was available in two or four-wheel drive unfortunately nobody bought it so today I'm going to take you on a tour of the Tahoe Hybrid and I'm going to explain why that is first I'm going to show you all of the quirks and features of the Tahoe Hybrid then I'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then I'm going to give it a dug score and for more of my thoughts on the Tahoe Hybrid click the link below to visit autotrader.com slash oversteer where I've also rounded up a list of some other oddball 2000 GM cars currently listed for sale on auto trader now I'm gonna start the course and features by discussing why the Tahoe Hybrid wasn't successful and that means starting with the Tahoe hybrids single most excessive characteristic unfortunately it wasn't fuel economy it was badging for example there is a giant hybrid badge here down the side of the car there is a hybrid badge here on the front fender there's a hybrid badge here on the c-pillar a nice green H come around to the back of the Tahoe Hybrid and what do we have the hybrid badge come around to the side of the Tahoe Hybrid and it is all repeated you have the green H on the C pillar you have the hybrid badge on the front fender and once again you have the giant hybrid decal spanning both doors on the side meaning that there's basically no angle you could look at this vehicle from and not realize that it is a hybrid hybrid hybrid hybrid now I don't mind an automaker going crazy with badging and other style updates when it really matters for example I made fun of the Ford Focus RS for having a lot of RS badges but that's a cool car you should show off that you got the RS unfortunately the Tahoe Hybrid isn't quite on that level you see for all of the badging that Chevy did the hybrid version of the Tahoe with four-wheel drive got 20 miles per gallon city and 20 miles per gallon highway the regular version with four-wheel drive got 14 miles per gallon city and 20 miles per gallon highway in combined driving therefore the hybrid got 20 miles city and highway and the regular Tahoe got 16 miles per gallon city highway meaning the Tahoe Hybrid gained you only four miles per gallon now I admit that is a pretty big percentage difference 25 percent but at the end of the day it's still only 4 miles per gallon in fact if you count up all the hybrid badging on the outside of this car you will get seven hybrid badges but it only got four more miles per gallon this vehicle has more hybrid badges then actual extra miles per gallon over this standard model and that's just absurd now this wouldn't even be so bad if the price premium over the regular Tahoe was fairly minor if Chevy only charged two grand more for four miles per gallon that would be a pretty good deal but of course they didn't the regular Tahoe LT which was the base vehicle for the hybrid that started at forty six thousand dollars the hybrid started at fifty five thousand dollars meaning you paid nine thousand dollars for four miles per gallon not exactly a great value proposition although admittedly some of that nine grand probably went to all of the hybrid badging but Chevy didn't stop there with distinguishing the Tahoe Hybrid from the regular Tahoe there are also a few other special little details known only to connoisseurs of the Tahoe Hybrid for example the front bumper the regular Tahoe front bumper had a few more like inlets and a little bit more style to it but they flattened it out for the Tahoe Hybrid for aerodynamics and below the front bumper Chevy added this big black plastic thing going around the entire front bumper also for aerodynamics so not as much air could get under the car and therefore hamper its fuel economy sports cars have a front splitter the Tahoe Hybrid has a front black plastic thing and it didn't stop there compared to the regular Tahoe Chevy lowered the Tahoe Hybrid I feel like about an inch or so also for aerodynamic purposes so the Tahoe Hybrid is lowered and Chevy removed the roof racks also for aerodynamic purposes which I'm sure gained them 0.004 miles per gallon those were all the exterior differences compared to the regular Tahoe Chevy also gave the Tahoe Hybrid its own distinctive and unique wheel design although I don't think that was to save fuel economy I just think that was so that you could stand out a little bit more with your hybrid hybrid hybrid does now before I get into the other quirks and features of the Tahoe Hybrid I want to say something I like hybrid SUVs I like them as a concept people like fuel economy and hybrid cars and people like SUVs and the idea of binding them is a good one and GM did it first with this vehicle and I applaud them for it the problem was it was just a bad execution it simply didn't get that much better fuel economy and it costs too much extra for all the hybrid stuff and so with that in mind we move on to the crooks and features that I'm going to start with one of my favorites on the steering wheel and notice there's a lot of buttons to control a lot of different things on the left you have the cruise control on the right you have the stereo and you have a next track button if you're listening to a CD but you do not have a previous track button so you can go forward in your tracks but if you want to listen to the same track again well too bad you're gonna have to reach into the center control stack under the stereo in order to do that next up an interesting quirk in the gauge cluster on the left side of the gauge cluster there is an economy gauge and you can see that part of it is white and part of it is green and I guess if you're in the green part then you're driving efficiently the problem is when you're driving this vehicle at night the entire gauge cluster lights up in the same color green and so there's no way to distinguish between non economy and economy at night you can tell General Motors didn't exactly put a lot of thought or effort into this gauge they were just like going on a hybrid I guess we better put an economy gauge in it and so they did next up another interesting item with this vehicle you put on the turn signal obviously the turn signals front and back turn on but there's also a red arrow that turns on in the mirrors now this vehicle came out in the days before mirror turn signals were common not many people were doing this back then but Chevy had this good idea to stick it in the mirrors so that people in your blind spot who couldn't see your front and rear turn signals could see those big red arrows in the mirrors it was actually a good idea so it's kind of odd to see them turn on when you're driving around and speaking of the turn signals the stock to turn on the turn signals is aggressively overcomplicated this car had a column shifter on the right side of the steering column so on the left side Chevy had to put everything in that stock so you have it controlling the turn signals you have a controlling the brights the front wiper and the rear wiper all in one vastly over complicated stock with dials and switches on it now like I mentioned even the rear wiper is integrated into this stock although incredibly difficult to figure out how to turn it on basically without someone telling you it's this switch at the end you move it over and that turns on the rear wiper the good news however is that once you've turned on the rear wiper you won't be trying to figure out did I press the right button did I push the right switch because well take a listen next up another interesting item with this vehicle like I mentioned a minute ago this cost around fifty five thousand dollars that was in 2011-2012 pricing so like seven eight years ago and I'm a little disappointed with what you got for your fifty five grand for example you get power front seats but only the bottom part is power the rest of the seat the backrest the lumbar that's all manually adjusted for fifty five thousand dollars eight years ago it's like sixty grand today with that said this vehicle has a vast innovation in the world of cupholders check this out you have the cupholders here in this front center console well they can either be here or here that's right you spent fifty five grand you can move your cupholders back four inches very configurable brilliant idea and now we're talking value for money mix-up two other interesting items one is over to the left of the steering wheel you have this little tiny square storage compartment I think that's four coins so the coins are easily accessible if you pull up to a tollbooth the problem of course being that it's just open so when you accelerate any coin that's in there is just gonna kind of shoot out but you know the idea is there same deal with the passenger footwell good idea having a passenger foot well unfortunately chevy decided to intrude on it with this giant plastic piece that Rob's a little bit of legroom and stretch out room down here it shouldn't really affect that much when you're sitting in this seat but it's not ideal next up another item very much worth mentioning with the Tahoe is the fact that this vehicle is a very poor use of space all right check this out this car is 202 inches long put away that our global viewers can understand it is about three feet longer than a current Volkswagen Golf but when you open the back there's a bit of a disappointment and that disappointment is cargo space you see even though this is a massive vehicle 202 inches along three rows of seats it doesn't have any cargo room behind the third row of seats take a look at this I go to put my backpack in this thing and I can't even fit my backpack in here with the third row in place and still have the tailgate closed meaning if you buy a towel you get this huge spacious giant vehicle you get all this room and you can carry around seven passengers but you can't also carry any of their stuff if you actually want to carry some cargo you'll have to remove the rear seats and then you can only carry around five people you get a 202 inch long car and you can't put both people and stuff in it at the same time although I admit there is enough room in the cargo area for my Jeep renegade now it's worth pointing out that if you did want more cargo room back here you could get rid of these third row seats but you could not fold them flat this is as flat as they go because this is a rear-wheel drive vehicle and they've got a differential all this other stuff underneath the car they don't have room for the seats to fold into the floor if you wanted to get rid of the seats entirely you had to remove them they were incredibly heavy and this was quite a process so no one ever really wanted to do it another drawback of the Tahoe and yet another drawback of the Tahoe came when it was time to close the tailgate now this vehicle existed in the days before widespread power tailgates and basically every vehicle and so you had to close it manually yourself which could be difficult for some people but fortunately chevrolet thought of that and they gave you this little loop to help you close the tailgate unfortunately I don't think it's actually possible to close the tailgate using the loop due to where it's positioned and just how heavy this thing is allow me to demonstrate in the end I guess the point of this loop back here is that you were supposed to use it to just pull the tailgate down most of the way and then quickly reach up and grab it and then close it completely again not very useful now the next up we move on to the back of this vehicle and this is the place in the vehicle where I think you can best see what I consider to be the really cheap materials in this car take a look for instance at the rear door panels measured paying fifty five sixty thousand dollars for this thing with options and you get this crappy cheap plastic all over the door panels it looks like the kind of thing you'd see in a really really low-end economy car when the doors are closed the gap between the door panel and the plastic on the pillar is just absolutely massive so much that you can see the exterior paint color through it it is just really not all that good craftsmanship and quality especially given the price of this vehicle now I don't want to beat the Tahoe up too badly for this because you gotta remember this car came out ten years ago and ten years ago even BMW and mercedes-benz interiors were a lot crappier than they are now and they had a lot of plastic in them too I guess I'm just surprised that there was a time in the fairly recent history where you would pay fifty five 60 grand for a car and this is all you could expect from the interior quality car interiors have definitely come a long way in 10 years now next up with all that said about the poor interior quality back here there is one item that is very impressive and that would be the screen that deploys from the ceiling this car had a rear seat entertainment system I guess you could plug in a DVD player through the red yellow white jacks and then you could watch your DVD in the back of your Tahoe Hybrid in the days before smartphones and iPads this was a pretty big deal and probably the people who bought this car cared more about having that then some nice material on the door panels now next up another disappointment in this car relates to the reverse lights and specifically the fact that at night when you lock this car and walk away that's something called exit lighting where the headlights and the reverse lights stay on for a minute after you've locked it and walked away now that's fine the idea here is that you know you lock your car in your drive you still want some lights on when you're trying to find your keys and get into your house so it's not pitch black and I get that but the problem is keeping the reverse lights on after you've walked away is true insanity think about it this way you park in a crowded parking lot you lock your Tahoe and walk away your reverse lights are now on for the next minute and every driver is looking for a space is going to pull up next to you and the Tahoe and they gonna think yes this person is leaving and they're sitting there waiting for you to back out except there's a problem you're not even in the vehicle you're in some store buying fragrances and candles as Christmas presents you're not even around your car and yet there's a person waiting for your spot because your reverse lights are on it's a really stupid piece of design GM still uses it to this day and they shouldn't they should get rid of it and next we move under the hood and you can see that's six litre v8 in the middle and some hybrid components over here with yet another hybrid badge showing you that's what they are now you may be wondering why the Tahoe Hybrid didn't get as good a fuel economy as other hybrid vehicles why it barely beat out the gas engine that's because Chevy didn't use as advanced of a hybrid system as cars like the Toyota Prius now I'm not going to get into all the technical details here but Chevy used what's called a two mode hybrid system which is cheaper than a more sophisticated system like the Toyota Prius has it was cheaper to develop cheaper to put in the parts so as a result the fuel economy gains weren't as significant as they could have been but the cost to the consumer room was also not as high as they would have been if Chevy had used a more sophisticated hybrid system now one other item worth noting under the hood on the underside of the hood itself there is one more hybrid badge you can see the little cross here that's meant to mimic the little green H on the C pillar and remind you once again that you're looking at a hybrid Tahoe from under the hood and so those are the quirks and features of the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives alright driving the Tahoe Hybrid now I gotta say some of my complaints could be addressed by the fact that this car is 10 years old um you know the seats not holding back that wasn't a crucial thing back then not everybody was doing it some of the poor materials also can be kind of explained away by this cars age not not everything is necessarily that bad about this car and I have to admit it's nice and quiet a lot of times it can operate in the full hybrid mode sort of at lower speeds or when you're you just turned it on and so this can be a surprisingly quiet full-size v8 SUV when you want it to do acceleration is actually reasonably good surprisingly so it feels surprisingly quick but you know a lot of the Tahoe is dead and still do they have big v8s but this one feels especially spry the six liter v8 a lot of power the ride is a little bit unsettled more than you would want it to be it's a little bit over bumps you can feel them a little bit too much and it's just a little bit I mean obviously the steering is very floaty the handling this thing does not feel at all like a sports car but nobody who was buying one expected it to be but over bumps it also just kind of has a tendency to unsettle the whole vehicle it's a big old body-on-frame vehicle so you go over a big bump there's a lot going on with the suspension the size of the vehicle generally speaking it just drives like a regular Tahoe from this era which actually is a vehicle that I like a lot and at one point I want to make clear you know this is a terrible hybrid SUV but it isn't a terrible SUV I think it's actually a pretty good vehicle it was just a terrible you know all-inclusive package of trying to hybridize the Tahoe and make it fuel-efficient it didn't do a great job of that but I think this is actually a pretty decent vehicle all in I don't know how reliable these hybrid Tahoe's are but if they are reliable I think it would probably actually be a pretty decent Buy today because when you think about it you can you do get 25% extra fuel coming I guarantee they don't have any price premium over regular Tahoe there's nobody specifically searching for one of these so if you buy it for the same money it starts to make some sense the thing that really killed the Tahoe Hybrid in my opinion actually not as much the hybrid powertrain and the additional expense you know General Motors could have developed it more gotten more fuel economy out of it made it a little bit cheaper and they sold this car through 2013 so they actually got six model years out of it the big problem though I think was that buyers shifted their tastes and they no longer one of these big Tahoe's and Suburbans quite as much what ended up happening was people seemed to start gravitating towards crossovers like the Chevy Traverse which got better fuel economy than the Tahoe and still seated seven and it wasn't like it was any smaller in sign because the Tahoe has that cargo area problem that I showed you and so you could get a traverse it's more car-like it's more easy to use in the city where most people are driving these things you know hauling families around and so it just didn't make sense anymore and so that's the Chevy Tahoe Hybrid you know the Chevy Tahoe from this era was not a bad vehicle and I like the idea of hybrid SUVs I think there should be more of them and frankly 20 miles per gallon in the city was a pretty good figure especially for a vehicle this big ten years ago but the Tahoe Hybrid had problems namely the identical highway fuel economy figure and the huge price increase over a standard Tahoe now Chevy tried admirably to compensate for those issues with excessive hybrid badging but it didn't quite work and now it's time to give the Tahoe Hybrid a dug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the Tahoe from this era looked fine nothing special and it gets a 5 out of 10 acceleration is decent for a big SUV but slow overall and it gets a 1 out of 10 handling is ponderous with light steering and big body roll and it gets a 2 out of 10 fun factor is low it's a big SUV with not much fun about it and it gets a 1 out of 10 finally cool factor and big SUVs are always a little cool but this one isn't especially exciting and it gets a 2 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 11 out of 50 next up are the daily categories and features the Tahoe Hybrid is fine nothing special only gets a 3 out of 10 comfort is good enough and it gets a 6 out of 10 quality is OK the powertrain is fairly reliable but the interior quality is mediocre and it gets a 6 out of 10 practicality is good with lots of seating and not too horrible fuel economy but cargo space is mediocre still it gets a 9 out of 10 you these are cheap and they carry a lot of people they're fine but nothing more and it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 30 out of 50 add it up and the Doug score is 41 out of 100 which places it here against some other older SUVs the Tahoe Hybrid is laughable for 55 or $60,000 but it's not so bad today on the used market as long as you don't mind being a rolling billboard for the word Hybrid

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,375,122

Rating: 4.6686854 out of 5

Keywords: chevy tahoe hybrid, tahoe hybrid, tahoe hybrid review, chevy tahoe hybrid review, tahoe review, chevy tahoe review, hybrid tahoe review, chevy review, chevy tahoe, chevrolet tahoe, chevrolet tahoe review, tahoe, doug demuro, doug de muro, de muro

Id: Elt-BDrPSMM

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/lostboyz]

These exist almost purely because of a DoE grant, nobody thought it would be a good idea, but when the government hands you free money, you take it.

[u/r_golan_trevize]

I feel like the difference between 14 mpg city and 20 mpg city is really being undersold here.

[u/RADical-muslim]

You can crack up the dash on these by telling a joke.

[u/Jawa000]

So glad Doug called out GM on the stupid reverse light leaving home “feature”. It’s too often I’m in a parking lot and see a car with it’s reverse lights on and stop, not because I want their space but often people just back out of a space without looking. It takes a second to realize it’s a GM car and that it’s their stupid design.

[u/The_Spot]

I really enjoy my over complicated turn signal, windshield wiper, cruise control, bright light control stalk on my Trans Am. All on one device and I know how to use it.

[u/SoFloShawn]

Missed quirk, the D-pillar and taillights are also unique to the Hybrid. They're LED and have a little lip on the edge to help airflow (supposedly).

It felt particularly spry because the Hybrid was the only way to get the 6.0L in these. The Denail/Escalade had the 6.2L, which had more power, but the 6.0L had nice low-end torque.

[u/Selenography]

Title: “This is a horrible SUV”

In the video: “But this isn’t a horrible SUV”

[u/Bentley-Benz]

TIL that Doug still uses the same backpack from middle school back in 2003.

Also, my brother actually bought a Yukon Denali Hybrid new in 2008. It only had two badges and the all electric mode was pretty cool to sneak up on people. I didn't hate it.

[u/Michelanvalo]

Doug rents terrible vehicles in order to provide us summer content. God speed, Doug. You drive those shitboxes on your road trips so we don't have to.