2027 Chevy Silverado HD 8.3L Duramax First Drive Review: This Hoss Went Bigger and Got Better

The story with the 2027 Silverado 1500 was its new small-block V8 engines. Apart from those and the exterior styling, the truck didn’t get many significant updates. But here on the heavy-duty side, there are more layers. Yes, the 2027 Chevy Silverado HD gets new engines (one’s only half-new, technically), and there’s also an updated interior, but Chevrolet made a break from the rest of the segment this year by introducing electronic power steering and brakes. Plus, the Bowtie made a big pivot from recirculating-ball steering to rack-and-pinion.

Believe it or not, all this makes just as much of a difference as that huge 8.3-liter Duramax—if not more.

The Basics

Some might have you believe that heavy-duty steering boxes are put together with parts forged somewhere in the Earth’s core. Indeed, it’s hard to argue with their robustness and the fact that it’s simply a tried-and-true system—one that may not be ideal for daily driving, but certainly gets the job done reliably. Heavy-duty pickups are squarely in the territory of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” so it took a long time for GM to get comfortable with making a long-term commitment to rack-and-pinion. How long, exactly? Well, the light-duty Silverado made the transition about a quarter of a century ago.

In addition to that paradigmatic shift, there’s also the spankin’ new Duramax diesel V8. Sporting 555 horsepower and enough torque to turn back time, the 8.3 gives the new 3500 HD a max tow rating of 38,000 pounds—double that of the mildly edited 6.6-liter gas V8. Unlike the light-duty, which got a new V8 related to the Corvette’s LS6, the HD makes do with the last-gen V8 architecture, still good for 412 horsepower and 472 lb-ft of torque.

The New Look

If you see it from the side, you’d be forgiven for missing the 2027 Silverado’s mild redesign. The new front lights and tweaks to the bumper and grille are all that really give it away. Catch it from the wrong angle and you won’t spot the differences. The big “8.3L Duramax” badge on the hood of diesel models certainly helps.

The New Drive

The switch to rack-and-pinion wasn’t made to improve the Silverado HD’s capabilities. It’s more precise and less fatiguing to operate since you’re apt to make fewer small corrections, but it doesn’t do anything to make the truck better on paper, strictly speaking. When we asked Ken Morris, GM’s senior vice president of product integration, safety, and motorsports, to explain what’s so special about the new setup, he boiled it down to just two words: “Drive one.”

Normally, a twisty mountain road is lost on something as large as the Silverado HD, but this felt like a perfect opportunity. Negotiating switchbacks just feels like work in most HD pickups. Behind the wheel of the new Silverado, it doesn’t feel like much of anything. The HD simply drives like a slightly heavier half-ton.

I mentioned before that electronic power steering and brakes don’t have any inherent capability advantages over their old-school hydraulic equivalents, and that’s true, but they do offer something that the old hardware couldn’t: full integration with Chevy’s drive mode system.

We got to see this in action when we took the Silverado HD ZR2 for a little off-pavement excursion and began to experiment with its drive modes. Both Off-Road and Terrain modes change the Silverado’s steering and brake effort, and Terrain mode offers a one-pedal driving feature which relies on the truck’s computer having the ability to fully modulate the truck’s brakes. Both of these features are dependent on their respective electronic architectures, and both work quite well. One-pedal driving is about as intuitive as it gets when you’re negotiating a tough incline or descent; it’s like having a manual transmission locked in first gear that you can’t possibly stall.

The Big Duramax

A good diesel engine should do two things: Get things done, and do it with little fanfare. Put another way, a diesel should just work, and work hard. With an extra 85 hp and 255 lb-ft of torque compared to the old Duramax, the new 8.3-liter ought to be more than capable—and Chevy staged several towing demonstrations to give us a taste of what that feels like on the road.

And what is that, exactly? In a word, authoritative. But don’t confuse that with overpowering. If anything, the new Duramax is fairly subtle in its delivery. Sure, get on it and the big V8 whistles and snorts and tries to kick the rear end in the direction of whichever tire had the indecency to offer less immediate traction, but once the HD’s heft catches up with the axle, the thing might as well be on rails—and certainly any comparisons to a locomotive are particularly apt.

But once you’re chugging along, the Duramax fades beautifully into the background. Keep it down around idle speeds and you’d be hard pressed to notice the thing at all; squeeze the throttle and it wakes up immediately.

With the 2027 Silverado HD, Chevy has leapfrogged the segment. That’s not unusual in the truck game; in fact, it’s almost par for the course with a truck launch. Whoever has the newest rig gets to be first for a little while. Rinse, and repeat. But even by those standards, this new Silverado is a pretty big leapfrog. The 8.3-liter Duramax is a game-changer by itself, but combined with the new electronic steering and brakes, it represents a massive leap forward for everyday comfort. At this point, that’s pretty much the only thing left for these trucks to explore. They’ve gone just about everywhere else.

Chevrolet provided The Drive with travel, hotel accommodations, and access to the 2027 Silverado lineup for the purpose of this review.

2027 Chevrolet Silverado HD Specs

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