2019 Gmc Sierra 1500 Sle on 2040-cars

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Watch GM's new pickup crash its way to five-star NHTSA ratings

General Motors has just scored a big win with its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, acing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration New Car Assessment Program. The two full-size trucks had already netted a five-star Overall Vehicle Score in their crew-cab variants, but the new testing certifies them as five-star trucks in both regular and double-cab bodystyles, so GM's trucks offer top ratings across the board.
"Our incredibly capable trucks have been engineered to be some of the safest," Gay Kent, GM's general director of Vehicle Safety and Crashworthiness said. "We've designed the vehicle structure, strategically placed high-strength steel and developed the occupant restraint system to achieve high levels of safety performance."
The scores mark the Silverado and Sierra as the first pickups to net five-star scores since NHTSA beefed up their testing regime in 2011, a nice feather in GM's cap as it continues to slug out the pickup truck wars with crosstown rivals Ford and Ram.

GMC Syclone spools up a storm on Jay Leno's Garage

A storm was brewing on American roads in the early 1990s. That's when Detroit's automakers were producing some of the hottest performance trucks ever devised – models like the Ford Lightning, GMC Typhoon, and its flyweight pickup sibling, the GMC Syclone. Jay Leno just happens to have one of the latter in his garage, and took it out to showcase in this latest video segment. The Syclone was an exercise in absurdity, and could not only trounce any other pickup on the road, it could outrun anything else GM made and just about anything else on the road – beating Ferraris and Porsches off the line. In a pickup, for crying out loud. The kicker is that its engine wasn't such a monster, either: under the hood sat a 4.3-liter turbocharged V6 pumping out what would seem by today's standards to be an adequate 280 horsepower and 350 pound-feet of torque. Even the smaller of the EcoBoost V6s available in today's Ford F-150 produces more than that. But in a lightweight, compact pickup, those figures were enough to propel the Syclone to 60 in 4.3 seconds and run the quarter-mile in 13.6 seconds. Long before the dune-jumping Ford F-150 SVT Raptor or even the Viper-powered Dodge Ram SRT-10, GM made fewer than 3,000 Syclones based on the compact Sonoma (sister to the Chevy S-10) and another 4,700 of the Typhoon, which was mechanically similar but more practical (albeit heavier) wagon bodywork from the Jimmy. But as Jay aptly points out, the Syclone was the one you wanted. Scope it out in the ten-minute video clip above.

GM to sell rebranded Peugeot vans in US?

According to a report by France's La Tribune cited by Reuters, General Motors and Peugeot are discussing the possibility of selling PSA Peugeot-Citroën commercial vans in the US through The General's dealership network. While specific models and what brand they may sell under stateside are not immediately clear, the move isn't entirely out of the blue, particularly since GM owns seven percent of the French automaker.
Peugeot and GM already have a joint-venture agreement to ease costs associated with vehicle development and procuring parts, and while the progress of the arrangement has been inhibited some by Europe's difficult economy, the two automakers are looking to expand the relationship. With sales in the dumpster, Peugeot's long-term prospects have looked particularly shaky as of late, and GM could use a modern commercial van lineup to better compete with North America's suddenly modern and Euro-fied competition. Mercedes-Benz kicked off the high-roof trend with its Sprinter, and for 2014, Ford is following with its Transit van (joining its smaller Transit Connect sibling), while Chrysler is leveraging its relationship with Fiat to rebrand the Ducato range of vans as Ram Promaster models.
Peugeot already has a full line of commercial van solutions in its stable, from its compact Partner and Bipper models to the larger Expert and Boxer models, which are available in a variety of cargo and people-carrying configurations.