I Drove The Quite Fast Chevy Blazer EV SS And It Made Me Question The Very Nature Of Cars And Fun

I had a pretty strong reaction to the 2025 Chevrolet Blazer EV SS, but I’m not exactly sure it’s the one Chevy wanted me to have. It’s an impressive machine, no question: a 615 horsepower electric SUV with 303 miles of range. It’ll go from a dead stop to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds. It’s pretty roomy and comfortable and has all the modern electronic crap you’d expect – well, minus CarPlay or Android Auto, because GM is delusional – but I don’t really want to give it a review now, because I think there’s a bigger fundamental question that needs addressing here: in the context of a modern, powerful EV, what is “fun?”

I’m asking this question because this isn’t just any Blazer EV, it’s the SS version of the Blazer EV. And that doubled-S, despite its unfortunate sameness to another pair of S’s with a very sinister past, does mean something. It means performance, it means excitement, it means thrills, and, yes, it means fun.

Chevy knows this, too. Look, it’s the first thing they mention in their slide about what the SS designation means:

Fun! It’s supposed to be fun! And what do they mention specifically?

“…canyon roads, cruising the highway, or around town.”

The canyon roads thing came up multiple times when I asked Chevy’s PR folks about what they thought people could do with an electric SUV that was capable of hauling such prodigious amounts of ass. Almost all of them said “canyon carving!” eagerly in response to this question, and I’m sure that would be pretty fun.

Chevy let me take one of these on the track and whip it around a lot, and I have to say, for a tall, roughly 5,700-pound machine, it handled remarkably well, a bit under-steery but generally far better than looking at it would have you believe. You likely could take this out to the Angeles Crest parkway on Sunday morning with all the swarming Lotuses in their Skittles colors and keep up in a way that would definitely surprise everyone who was watching.

Would that be fun? Sure! More fun than a Lotus? No, not really, but a Lotus isn’t going to take six months’ worth of Costco smoked salmon and a bale of Kirkland-brand underpants back home with your partner and two kids in the car, is it? No, it isn’t.

But are normal Chevy Blazer EV owners going to actually take this thing out canyon carving? More than, like, twice? I’m not so sure. And the nice Chevy PR people also explained that, you know, it can make day-to-day driving more fun with all that horsepower, and merging onto on-ramps can be thrilling, and, yeah, okay, I don’t exactly doubt any of this, but the entry-model 300-horsepower Blazer EV LT, which starts at $44,600, can still get to 60 in a very respectable 5.7 seconds and costs about $17,500 less than the SS, probably can still be driven around town in a fun way and I’m sure merges onto highways just fine.

I drove the Blazer EV SS around on city streets and on the track, and yes it’s fast, and yes it’s impressive, but is it actually fun? And, maybe more importantly, if it has fun-potential within it, can that fun be accessed at speeds that you can actually hit without potentially facing jail time?

That’s the part I’m not so sure about, and I think that part of it has to do with the very nature of electric cars. I’m not anti-EV at all, and technically you could argue that they are superior to combustion cars in nearly every way. For example, the Blazer EV SS is the quickest accelerating SS-badged vehicle that Chevy has ever made, going all the way back to the original Impala SS of 1961.

But it’s precisely because of how good and smooth and efficient EV drivetrains are and how sloppy and inefficient and clumsy combustion engines are that dictates why one is fun and one, well, just isn’t. The Blazer EV SS does deliver on the performance and handling of what the SS badge means, but it completely ignores the most irrational, and therefore most important, part: the drama.

Most of the people who bought SS-badged Camaros or Chevelles weren’t tracking them on a regular basis – I mean, some did, and they were popular at dragstrips, of course – but they were having fun in their cars almost every time they drove them because these cars were loud, growly things that vibrated and shook like they had perpetual armored weasel fights going on under the hood. All those years of carmakers trying to reduce noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) were gleefully ignored, and engineers did all they could to maximize every one of those three letters. Because these were muscle cars, and muscle cars aren’t quiet and smooth.

You could put them in neutral at a stop light and rev their big V8s, making a lot of, to quote Macbeth, sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But I guess you were signifying something: power and potential and danger and madness, all while wasting gas and pumping a bunch of toxic chemicals into the air. Doing this kind of thing was toxic on literal and metaphorical levels, it was loud and stupid, it was juvenile, and, above all else, it was fun.

All of it was fun: the noise, the smells, the shaking, the shifting, the fighting with the steering, the raw mechanicalness of it all, all of the things that make it inefficient and uncomfortable and laborious, those are the things that give the car character.

There’s no drama to the Blazer EV SS; sure, Chevy tried to program some in, making you select the WOW (Wide Open Watts) mode to unlock an extra 100 hp and the car’s full potential, but it’s just like putting flame stickers on a beige office filing cabinet. The Blazer EV SS is just too damn good at what it does. Like all electric motors, the Blazer EV SS makes all its torque from 0 RPM, it delivers power smoothly and quietly, and at a stoplight the engine is completely dormant, wasting nothing, unable to be revved up like a horny teen is at the wheel because those words mean nothing in the context of an electrical motor.

When Chevy says the Blazer EV SS can be fun driving around town, what do they mean, exactly? That you can get to 40 mph in a neighborhood a little quicker? You can maybe squeal a tire making a fast turn into the Trader Joe’s lot? The thing has too much speed and power to actually really open up in day-to-day driving, and in normal driving it sounds and feels as quiet and smooth as any EV, so what’s the point?

You can’t really do anything with those 615 horses in 99% of your time behind the wheel, and those horses are so well-behaved you don’t even know they’re there until you stomp the pedal. So, does it even matter that they’re there at all?

An honestly fun daily driver is something that delivers drama and fun at speeds between 35-55. You don’t have to actually be going fast, but you need to feel like you are. There’s a reason why so many people love driving 115 hp Maza Miatas, and it’s because you can wring them out at speeds that would, by right, place you in the slow lane, and that’s exactly how it should be.

The Blazer EV SS is a very impressive and capable machine; it’s competent and comfortable, and very likely a reasonable choice for anyone looking for a good EV for the family. And, sure, you’ll have a blast driving it hard through the canyons precisely three times in the entire time you own the car, but without all of the callow and insipid and wonderful drama of a combustion car, where’s the fun, exactly?

So, this is my problem with the Blazer EV SS: it’s too good to be actually fun. It’s too efficient and refined and rational, and those aren’t really recipes for fun, at least not as we understand them. And if you want to argue that power and speed is fun enough unto itself, even then the Blazer EV SS makes no sense, because just where the hell is an average Blazer owner going to go to use these abilities? How many Blazer owners take their cars to the track?

If it’s not fun, what’s the point? Driving the Blazer just made me realize that for an everyday car to be truly fun, you have to be able to access that fun at normal street speeds, and, ideally, it should feel fun, in some good, dumb, fun ways. If EVs are going to reach that goal, we need to do something other than just adding power and speed.

Sorry, Chevy. It’s still impressive, though!