A long, long time ago, starting in the late 60's Chevrolet and Ford offered competitive models of what we now refer to as SUV's. Chevy's vehicle was the Blazer, based on a K5 pickup truck chassis, and the Ford was a Bronco. Both companies have played games with those names in various ways over the years, but the two basic "historical" vehicles remain the icons of the brand names, fondly remembered by car people who are old enough to care.
Both the Bronco and the Blazer were in many ways junk. They had primitive 4-wheel drive setups in which you had to get out of the vehicle to lock in the front hubs when going off road and then unlock them when you got back to pavement. They were both slow gas hogs, handled terribly, and rusted with amazing rapidity. Still, their owners loved them, and they were saddened when, basically, the EPA made them not viable.
The most recent incident of name-abuse for the Blazer came when Chevy introduced its current Blazer in 2019, to no particular fanfare. This vehicle was designed, obviously, for the male who had owned a Camaro, but due to an expanding family, now had to "settle for" a crossover. The styling clearly resembled Camaro styling, it handled reasonably well for the type of car it was, and Chevy offered its 3.6L V6 and turbo 4 engines for those who wanted a bit of performance. When properly equipped, it was exactly what Chevy intended: a crossover that someone who really wanted a Camaro could live with.
On the other side of the world, you had Ford, which was looking enviously at the sales numbers for the profoundly mediocre Jeep Wrangler, and thought they could easily produce a comparable vehicle that was a little bit better at a comparable price. Enter the 2021 Ford Bronco. It's rollout had a few glitches, but it has generally been a good, successful vehicle for them, and in concept it was a modernized "Bronco" of old. It could go off road, it went and handled relatively well, but it wasn't as much of a gas hog as the old Bronco.
So why do I write this? Virtually every reviewer of the Blazer has bemoaned the fact that the new Blazer is not an off-road monster like the old K5 Blazer or the new Bronco are.
IT WAS NOT INTENDED TO BE!!! It is a totally different concept, one that is well-executed for its intended purpose, which is NOT going off road.
Chevy fucked up with the naming of this vehicle. Maybe they should have done what Mitsubishi did and call it a "Camaro-Cross," or something, but it seems to me that ALL of the media criticism of this vehicle is based on the fact that it is not what THEY (the writers) thought it should be. They ignore the fact that it is a good vehicle in its own right, and was never intended as an off-road monster.
The new EV version will have its own problems. Right now, it is over-priced, and its specs (performance, range, charging times) are not even competitive with a Tesla Model Y. The promised SS version will probably top $70k.
