I drove a $77,000 GMC Yukon Denali to see if the huge SUV is worth the premium price — here's the verdict (GM)

• The GMC Yukon Denali is about as upmarket as you can get without entering the true luxury realm.
• The full-size SUV has plenty of room for passengers and stuff, and it can tow a respectable 8,400 lbs. with four-wheel-drive and a beefy 6.2-liter V8 engine.
• I liked the Yukon Denali for its abundant power, smooth ride, and ability to tote a serious load.

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When people think of big luxury SUVs, nameplates such as the Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator come to mind. That's understandable because when it comes to the largest players in the market, the Caddy and the Lincoln — along with the Lexus LX and the Infiniti QX80 — have been around for so long that they're extremely well-known.

Traditionally, if you wanted Escalade scale, for example, minus the Escalade price, you could drop down in the General Motors lineup to the Chevy Tahoe or Suburban. For a bit more premium-ness, there was the GMC Yukon. But GMC, in particular, has been doing something interesting, offering a near-luxury, super-premium trim level called "Denali."

I've sampled a bunch of Denali-grade GMCs, and last year, I took an extended wheelbase version of the Yukon Denali on a family road trip.

More recently, the standard-wheelbase Yukon Denali landed in my driveway, just in time to take my three children to summer camp, roughly a 4-hour, round-trip jaunt. Throw in my lovely wife, as well as enough gear to get a trio of kids through two weeks away from home, and we had a good test of the Yukon Denali's capabilities. 

The vehicle was a 2018 Denali, with a base price of $69,165, but optioned up, our tester came to $77,390. I tooled around in it for a week, apart from the aforementioned weekend run. I didn't tow anything, but this SUV has some serious capacity, with a rating of up to 8,400 lbs.

Here's what I thought.

 

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The "Onyx Black" Yukon Denali landed in my driveway and promptly filled it up. Note the Denali grille, a massive yet intricate signature element.

This Yukon Denali is more compact, if you will, than the XL I previously sampled.

From stem to stern, it's about 204 inches, with a cargo capacity when all three rows of seats are deployed of about 15 cubic feet.

The XL is around 244 inches long, with more than twice as much cargo area and a notably larger third row.

Our tester came with 20-inch aluminum wheels, but if I were buying, I'd go for the optional 22-inchers, to better fill those huge wheel arches. 

For the record, the XL is so named because it's longer, with extended length and wheelbase.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Contributer : Tech Insider https://read.bi/2F37RtA

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