Big Blue: 2005 GMC Yukon Denali

[Jake]

Well, it's been 10k miles of ownership so I figured I'd sum up how things have gone so far.

Driving Impressions
For being a giant American land yacht, it drives better than it ought to. The Magneride and rear air ride keep it pretty composed. The ginormous V8 makes really good noises and I kind of want an intake or something for it. The transmission is dimwitted but generally does its job without much banging and clanging around. Every so often I catch it off guard and it WHUMPs its way into a gear it didn't initially expect.

Towing Impressions
Fantastic. Gearing is marginally shitty when leaving a red light - that 1st to 2nd ratio change means you really need to wind out 1st if you want to keep up with traffic - but otherwise it does well. 13ish MPG towing at 70 mph is not all bad IMO. I'm glad I got something this size vs. an X5 or Touareg. It sucks a little bit to daily drive but is very stable when towing at higher speed.

Repair Costs
It's needed new front brakes ($100 for PFC pads and RockAuto rotors) which I did myself, and valve cover gaskets ($250 parts + labor) and a steering box ($500 parts + labor) that I did not do myself, either because of laziness or a lack of time. Oil changes are done per the dashboard notification and seem to come up every 6k miles. There's a lot of room to work on things.

What's Broken
It leaks oil and power steering fluid and thus needs an oil pan gasket and, well, I gotta figure out the P/S leak. I'll do both of those repairs myself. It'll also need a set of tires by the end of summer. I'm looking at roughly $800 in tires which is less than I thought I'd be spending. The tires on it now are super old so hopefully the replacements will last an equally long time.

Oh, and the rear HVAC is stuck on "very warm" because a stupid plastic piece that controls the hot/cold blend door for the rear broke off. If I get a sudden burst of motivation and find myself with an abundance of time, I'll rip apart the HVAC box and fix it. But the front vents work fine for air conditioning, and the heat works throughout the entire cabin, so... not a priority.

In Summary
I wanted to make a Euro SUV work, badly, for my needs. Everyone managed to convince me to try a giant American pickup-based variant instead. It had nasty panel gaps when it was brand new, it has an abundance of plastichrome on every surface, literally everything rattles when you hit a pebble on the road, the drivetrain is as advanced as a #2 pencil, and I thought I'd hate this Yukon because of those things.

But, I don't. It's fantastic. I don't like the newer ones nearly as much, but I understand why you see sooo many GMT800 SUVs and pickups on the roads still. I grew up riding around in a few - several friends' parents had various Tahoes and Yukons and Suburbans - and even with all the typical "GMisms" that the platform exhibits, it somehow "works" really well.