This ute was made for camping
How much camping equipment can you fit into a Holden Colorado ute? Rob Maetzig packs up and finds out.
Every season there are certain questions that are always asked. Right now it is summer (no, it is!), so the questions include: Is it always this rainy and windy? How come I put on so much weight over Christmas-new Year? Is that cold chicken still safe to eat? Have we run out of beer already?
And then there is this question: How on earth am I going to get all that camping gear into that vehicle?
Yes folks, for the past few weeks motorists all over New Zealand have been asking that very question of themselves. They’ve been looking at huge piles of tents, awnings, bedding, storage bins, cookers and other equipment and have wondered how it is going to fit into their vehicle.
Maybe they’ve eased things by getting hold of a trailer, although even then load space can still very quickly become an issue. Maybe they’ve decided that there should be sufficient room inside their SUV or wagon. Maybe – recipe for disaster – they have ordered family members to reduce what’s to be taken on holiday.
Or maybe they’ve taken advantage of the load space available in a one-tonne ute.
These are the vehicles of the moment in New Zealand. Officially called Pick Up/chassis Cabs, they now account for 21 per cent of all new vehicle sales in this country.
Utes are so popular that last year 31,538 of them were sold, with various brands running 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th in the list of the Top 10 most popular vehicles.
And an interesting trend within this popularity is the growing demand for double-cab versions that are loaded with specification and equipment.
These vehicles are not cheap, carrying retail prices as high as the $70,000s. But for the money the owners get an appealing combination of grunt and loadcarrying capability, high safety and luxury specification, and surprisingly good road manners.
An outstanding example is the Holden Colorado, which received such a comprehensive facelift in 2016 that we named the model our Top Pickup Truck. In 2016 it enjoyed a year-end surge in sales following the facelifted model’s launch in mid-september, and that moved it into a solid third place on the sales ladder behind Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux.
And as expected, the most popular models are the most comprehensively specified ones. Biggest seller is the 4WD LTZ double-cab which is the secondflashest Colorado on the Kiwi market, and the top Z71 model with all the bling is also doing rather well.
As New Zealand moved into 2017, we took a Z71 on a camping holiday – to Papamoa, venue of a really good camping resort, possibly New Zealand’s best butchery (beef, chilli and chocolate sausages, anyone?), and home to the notorious Mount Mauler, the invisible insect that hides in dry sand and rewards beach-goers with very itchy little bites.
But first we had to get there, complete with everything required for a comfortable family camping holiday.
For starters, we loaded the interior. A very good design feature with the Colorado crewcab is that the rear seat squabs can be folded upward and secured in place using a hook around the headrests, and that opens up a substantial floor-to-ceiling load space. We soon filled that.
Then it was the turn of the rear wellside. Under normal circumstances the Z71 features a soft tonneau cover that is removable. But our ute featured a hard tonneau cover made of ABS polycarbonate plastic, and this $3220 option cannot be removed. It looks really stylish and it has the added benefit of being lockable, but it does impact on the Colorado’s load-carrying capability because everything has to be stored below the level of the wellside, otherwise the tonneau can’t be closed.
Despite this restriction, we got everything aboard so we could be on our way – and began to experience some very good things about the Colorado.
When fully laden with cargo such as camping equipment, this Holden is a very good open-road drive. Its dynamics have been significantly improved as a part of the facelift anyway, thanks to a number of suspension revisions in the interests of better body control, introduction of electric power steering and new engine, transmission and body mounts. But when the ute is empty, its rear leaf springs and ute-specific suspension settings mean it can still bounce around a bit, albeit to a lesser extent than before.
Pile a load of camping cargo on board, and all that disappears. The Z71 settles down to the extent it offers a comfortable drive on a par with your average SUV and probably as good as its SUV sibling the Trailblazer which has a coil sprung rear suspension.
And it is quiet too – part of the facelift involved introduction of what is called a Centrifugal Pendulum Absorber torque converter, which helps reduce engine noise and vibration by cancelling out the torsional vibrations in the driveline that are normally felt in a ute’s cabin.
The cabin itself is nice. It has a redesigned dash that is much better than before, and it features GM’S latest Mylink communications system equipped with Apple Carplay and Android Auto.
And one really good feature is a reversing camera that offers a display via the Holden’s 8-inch colour touch-screen that has to be one of the most accurate I have encountered. Seriously, there was no problem getting the vehicle’s towbar to within millimetres of an obstacle.
It all added up to a very good vehicle to take on a camping assignment. That 2.8-litre turbodiesel is a capable engine, able to develop 147 kilowatts of power and 500 Newton metres of torque when mated to the ute’s six-speed automatic transmission, so there was no issue handling the load that was stored inside the cabin and on the wellside.
And the quite dramatic improvements made to the Colorado’s noise levels, particularly a lowered engine noise, simply added to the experience.
So that begs the question: Is a ute the best vehicle to take camping? Is is better than an SUV or a wagon?
Could be. There’s no doubt that it does offer more load space, even when fitted with a hard plastic tonneau cover. And of course if we had run really short of room, we could have hitched up a trailer and made full use of the vehicle’s torque.
Not only that, but the Colorado Z71 looks good – which at Papamoa led to a number of lively discussions with Ford Ranger owners who seemed to be everywhere.
While some of them declared they’d never be seen dead in a Holden, most did admit that our Summit White Colorado did look a picture.
So we took that as a win – which gave us comfort as we applied the anti-itch cream to the bites left behind by those aggressive Mount Maulers. Ouch!