When It Comes to Testing the 2024 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 Bison, Protection Has Its Price

Specialized capability generally comes with added cost, no matter the context. We generally associate cost with money, but it can also mean performance, functionality, and more. In this case, it’s all of the above, and yet somehow the 2024 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 Bison still ends up feeling like a bargain.

What’s So Bison About It?

For the unfamiliar, the Bison package is a bunch of hardcore off-road hardware designed in collaboration with aftermarket specialist AEV. It consists of AEV-stamped steel front and rear bumpers with recovery points on the rear and a front winch mounting point, five boron steel underbody skidplates, tubular steel rock rails below the doors, 17-inch beadlock-capable wheels with 35-inch Goodyear Wrangler all-terrain tires, and fender flares. Multimatic supplies hydraulic jounce absorbers, and its spool-valve shock absorbers are retuned for the Bison’s new features.

All that means you can go bashing over boulders with little fear of doing any real damage to your truck. We spent a whole day doing exactly that and only came back with a dent in the passenger side rock rail and a scrape on the underside of the rear bumper, with plenty more to match it on the skidplates. Those parts are meant to get beat up, though. That’s the whole point. There was zero body damage and no mechanical failures despite some truly cringe-inducing hits to the underbody protection.

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What About Those Costs You Mentioned?

The headline cost is the fiscal one. The Bison starts at $60,540, and our test vehicle came in at $64,730 all said and done. A standard ZR2 starts at $48,395, so you’re paying a substantial amount of money for all that extreme off-road hardware. Whether that’s worth it to you will depend on how far off-road you go, not to mention the other non-monetary costs we’ll get to.

As you can imagine, all that extra steel is heavy. This Bison weighs 347 pounds more than the last standard ZR2 we weighed, blowing right past the 5,000-pound mark and ringing up at 5,273 pounds. That’s as much as a low-spec Ford F-150.

That extra weight takes a predictable toll on performance. Accelerating, the Bison is 0.3 second slower getting up to 60 mph than a standard ZR2, needing 7.5 seconds to do the deed. That gap is maintained through the end of the quarter mile, with a 15.7-second sprint moving at 85.8 mph by the finish line (2.6 mph slower than the base ZR2).

It’s the same story doing the opposite. Braking from 60 mph to a stop now takes 133 feet, 2 feet farther than a plain ZR2.

Handling is more of the same. In steady-state cornering on the skidpad, the heavier Bison predictably struggles to hang on as tightly and pulls 0.70 average lateral g compared to the ZR2’s 0.71. On our figure-eight course, though, the chonky Bison needs a 28.9-second lap at 0.56 average g—four tenths behind the lighter ZR2 at the same g.

Then there are the functional costs. That extra weight, combined with the larger, heavier wheel and tire package, makes the Bison ride more stiffly on the street than the cushy ZR2. It’s enough of a difference to make you stop and think whether you’ll really use the Bison package or if the standard underbody protection is enough for your needs. So, too, will the Bison’s bed-mounted spare tire that blocks most of the rear window, making the rearview mirror effectively useless (and a digital one is not offered). You’ll also need to relearn how to climb into and out of the truck so you don’t bust your shins on the protruding rock rails.

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How Is That a Bargain?

Sounds like a lot of money and compromise on the face of it, but consider the competition, and it starts to look a lot better. A new Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro starts at $65,395, more than this truck with its options included. The Jeep Gladiator Rubicon X and Gladiator Mojave X both start at $64,890, also slightly more than this optioned-up Bison. A Ford Ranger Raptor, at least, is cheaper to start at $57,065 but is built for high-speed off-roading and doesn’t have the same extreme rock-crawling capabilities of the rest of those trucks.

No, the Colorado ZR2 Bison isn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it does what it does better than the direct competition for less money, and we call that a bargain.