I completely agree. There will always be a market for a heavy duty SUV option in the US. I'm sure that in the boardrooms when the auto manufacturers were planning their future fleets 10 years ago, it felt safer to invest any available capital into EVs and improving SUV fuel efficiency, given the looming CAFE mandates and the direction it seemed the industry was going. I would've been the little voice in the back (okay, I'm not a small man and I don't have a small voice, but whatever) saying y'all are betting against the American dad who likes beefy trucks and has a brood of offspring he wants to take on adventures, and that's never a good bet.
On the topic of shocks, I did find a little tidbit that's interesting: Apparently the OEM for the factory shocks on the HD pickups (Z71 excluded but presumably inclusive of our 3500 Suburbans) is Tenneco. Tenneco also makes Rancho and Monroe.
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Gas mileage averaged right at 8 mpg - sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on speed and terrain. But we did have a minor issue pop up that went away just as quickly. On the way down about 100 miles into the trip, the fuel gauge suddenly dropped to zero. No low fuel warning light or chimes. We stopped at a rest area and I looked everything over to make sure we weren't in fact dumping fuel, shut it off and started it back up, but the gauge remained on E and the miles remaining to empty screen was reading "--". But the average fuel economy screen still worked so I calculated our next fuel stop accordingly and we made it just fine. After fill-up the gauge was working again and continued to work for the rest of the trip. My guess is after sitting so long under prior ownership and then sitting in our garage for several weeks, the fuel sender was sending out enough odd information that the computer shut it off. But who knows - I'm just glad it's working again.
