If you’ve recently shopped for a full-size truck, you were most likely overwhelmed by just how enormous these pickups have become. This is particularly true in the heavy-duty segment, where instead of subtly infusing additional capacity beneath a traditionally styled truck’s skin, the entire segment has instead engaged in the kind of over-the-top body-builder cosplay that suggests inspiration derived from Michael Bay’s Transformers film series.
This embiggening has dovetailed with the industry obsession with pushing owners as far off-road as they can, with all manner of trim levels, options packages, and special models convincing pickup owners they’re doing it wrong unless they’re in the mud at all times. This is how we end up with trucks like the 2024 GMC Sierra 2500 HD AT4X AEV Edition, a pickup whose overall dimensions are rivalled only the by length of its name.
Factory bro-dozers are now a fact of life. While you can easily find them in their natural habitat, lurking outside the closest suburban strip-mall chain restaurant taking up several parking spots at once, they’re also increasingly infiltrating the job sites once reserved for more task-focused fare. It’s here that two seemingly unstoppable pickup truck trends — gym-rat bulk and all-terrain tallness — collide to create chaos when it’s time to actually get some work done.
I faced down this exact predicament when I tagged in the AT4X AEV to tow my track car to Watkins Glen International, a raceway tucked into rolling hills of northern New York. Heavy-duty is normally overkill for a trailer-and-car combo that collectively weighs in at just under two tons, barely even a fifth of the 10,000 kilos of capacity on offer from the GMC — and in this case my experience was a stark reminder that off-road fun and towing acumen don’t always go together like peanut butter and chocolate, no matter how big a stick you stir them with.
All The Acronyms, Please
Wearing the results of a refresh for the 2024 model year, the 2500 HD looks suitably surly in the aggro fashion that has been adapted to nearly every pickup of its ilk. Onto its bulldog countenance and big-boned frame (with a total length of more than six metres, two metres of width, and a carwash-colliding two-point-one metres of height) the AT4X AEV model projects a long list of off-road features and accoutrements.
Most prominent are the big steel bumpers found at either end of the vehicle (with room for a winch install, natch) along with 35-inch AT tires wrapped around bespoke 18-inch wheels. With its 1.5-inch suspension lift over a standard 2500 HD, the AT4X AEV also provides a good look at the DSSV shock absorbers installed at each corner, courtesy of Canadian race-car builders Multimatic (and available elsewhere in the General Motors pickup truck line-up on top-tier dune-destroyers).
My tester came with the Sierra’s nuclear option under its hood, a 6.6-liter turbodiesel V8 good for 470 horsepower and an absurd 975 lb-ft of torque. Managed by a 10-speed Allison automatic transmission, GMC has tuned the engine for maximum low-end production, with all of that prodigious pulling power available at just 1,600 rpm.
A Hitch In My Hitch
My troubles taming the bro-dozer began right from the start. While 11.6 inches of ground clearance might be impressive when leaving the pavement behind, it proved to be a serious obstacle in mating my trailer tongue and the truck’s hitch. Even with a two-inch drop on the hitch itself — more than sufficient for most pickups out there — I was forced to bleed more than half the air out of the Sierra’s rear tires to make it squat low enough for a secure connection. For the rest of our time together, I travelled with a set of two-inch wooden blocks, which I placed under the tongue jack’s wheel to give it a much needed boost on re-connect.
Yes, there are height-adjustable hitches out there, and of course there are also fixed hitches with a more generous drop. That being said, neither would be necessary without the ATX AEV’s off-road aspirations boosting its suspension setup, as I have had no trouble using the same hitch on other heavy-duty trucks in the past.
Too Tight A Squeeze
While my hitch-up woes were a one-time stumble thanks to my repurposed chock blocks, there were other aspects of the AT4X AEV experience that were a continual nightmare. Leading the list was visibility. One would think that so lofty a perch would provide a birds-eye view of the road ahead, but the sheer size of the Sierra 2500 HD actually ended up creating massive blind spots along the front, rear, and sides of the truck.
Close-quarters parking situations are entirely reliant on how well you can see what your trailer is doing in relation to your steering inputs, and despite the truck offering more than a dozen camera angles of the area surrounding it, there were still situations where I had little to no confidence in my ability to place the trailer.
The problem was most pronounced at my own home, where my short driveway requires the negotiation of a left-hander to line a trailer up with its parking spot alongside my garage. Try as I might, the sheer bulk of the GMC made it impossible for me to cantilever around the corner without wiping out a rose bush, obliterating my stairs, or relocating an oak tree or two. The solution, as it turns out, wasn’t more technology, but less: I dropped the trailer in the road, hitched it to my 35-year-old Jeep Grand Wagoneer, and took advantage of that vehicle’s short wheelbase and expansive greenhouse to effortless stow the rig.
Unfortunately, on the road from Quebec to New York, I couldn’t bring my Jeep along in tandem, and so I was at the mercy of finding pull-through parking spots or wide-open spaces to stow the truck and trailer together. Even something as simple as a toll booth’s curbing or the tight confines of a rural road’s construction pylons became a “best guess” scenario due to the GMC doing its best impression of a decommissioned battleship.
Off-road fun and towing acumen don’t always go together like peanut butter and chocolate, no matter how big a stick you stir them with
I would also have liked to sample Super Cruise while towing — it’s somehow missing from the features list of a truck that costs $123,000 — as I’ve had good experiences with hands-free towing in the Cadillac Escalade in the past. The closest the Sierra 2500 HD gets is adding three extra blinks to the turn signal tap (because you’ve got more lane to occupy with each change) and extra following distance for each adaptive cruise control interval (as the vehicle takes longer to stop when towing).
Outperforming On The Road
Don’t get me wrong—there are two sides to the “overkill” portion of the 2024 GMC Sierra 2500 HD AT4X AEV towing experience. Those DSSV shock absorbers might have been designed to provide exceptional control in rocky off-road conditions without sacrificing on-pavement compliance, but they also turned out to be well-suited for the losing hand in the infrastructure game that all north-eastern drivers have been dealt.
Laden or not, the AT4X AEV provided a remarkably smooth ride. In fact, on the way back from WGI, I received a radio call from my father, who was towing his Mustang about 200 metres behind me as we trundled up I-81. “Something just flew off your trailer,” he told me.
Puzzled, I took the next exit and, after inspecting the car and the platform it was sitting on discovered that the lid for one of the trailer’s integrated toolboxes was missing. What had happened? Apparently, I had passed through a construction zone on a bridge that was so rough that a pothole impact ripped the half-metre piece of diamond plate off at the hinge, leaving the latch intact (and in fact, still locked). So cushioned was the GMC by its DSSV shocks that I never even registered anything resembling a bump up in the pickup’s sumptuously-appointed cabin, with my trailer’s double axles bearing the brunt of the blow.
Then there was the Sierra 2500 HD’s torque. The GMC shrugged off my sub-2,000-kilo load like a middle-schooler slipping the straps of their backpack, effortlessly eating steep grades, passing slower traffic at will, and generally leaving my father’s strong, but more heavily-laden F-150 in the dust.
Finally, GMC’s ProGrade Trailering System is a worthy piece of kit. Bundling together trailer lighting tests, a pre-trip checklist, and the ability to perch a remote camera at the top of an enclosed trailer to create a see-through view of the road behind, it allowed me to save a profile for the trailer I was using (and remind me when I forgot to connect the 7-pin harness). You can access most of these features through an app, too, which is convenient when trying to figure out which bulbs are burned out.
Seek Your Off-Road Elsewhere
The 2024 GMC Sierra 2500 HD was designed to tow your house — but if you order it in AT4X AEV Edition spec, you’ll be compromising its core mission for the fantasy of off-road dominance. The “one truck to do it all” concept only stretches so far, and in this case it ran up against a use case that highlighted the weaknesses inherent in its super-tough character.
Namely, if you’re towing anything other than a serious horse trailer, enormous boat, or enclosed rig, the ATX AEV trim level is a liability. With loads that large you’ll already be looking for a taxiway to turnaround on, but for casual trailering needs, this piece of megaton machinery fails to comfortably negotiate the hurdles imposed by a more modestly-sized day-to-day world.
To be blunt: bro-dozers don’t pass the tow test for the majority of non-commercial buyers, leaving fleet managers and contractors as the target audience for an options package that feels more at home on a half-ton than it does on a pickup that’s intended to work for a living.
Sign up for our newsletter Blind-Spot Monitor and follow our social channels on X, Tiktok and LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest automotive news, reviews, car culture, and vehicle shopping advice.