BY RON HAMMERTON | 31st Jul 2018
BIG. That’s overall impression about almost everything associated with the Chevrolet Silverado that is now rolling into Holden Special Vehicles (HSV) dealerships across Australia and New Zealand courtesy of a factory-backed right-hand drive conversion engineering and manufacturing program by HSV sister company Walkinshaw Automotive Group.
Along with the upcoming Chevrolet Camaro and current Holden Colorado SportsCat enhancement programs, the RHD Silverado is helping to fill the void left at HSV by the demise of local Holden Commodore production last year. It takes a big vehicle to fill such a big hole, and the Silverado is that for sure.
Take the exhaust pipe hanging out of the back of the Silverado 2500HD LTZ that we drove away from Walkinshaw’s latest factory at Clayton South, in Melbourne’s south-east.
We were moved to fetch a measuring tape to check the pipe tip’s diameter: 125mm. And then we stuck our head underneath to see if this was just fakery, like the last few centimetres of many exhaust pipes on vehicles today.
Nope. It is huge all the way up – at least 100mm, like a heavy duty stainless steel rainwater downpipe.
As Walkinshaw’s Silverado program manager Gareth Brown told us, it takes a big exhaust to handle the flow from a 6.6-litre V8 turbo diesel producing huge numbers – 332kW of power and 1234Nm of torque.
Yep. Everything about the Silverado is big.