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!
I think you might be able to have the same take on pretty much all modern cars.
When I started driving, a typical car was like a 4-cylinder Tempo. Most “normal” cars were so slow that maximum acceleration was in no way a thrilling experience. A nicer car like a 100-odd horsepower V8 Caprice was also very slow, with disconnected floaty ride and handling.
So the few cars that were sporty enough to have 0-60 times in the single digits or had a high-revving “DOHC” engine or actual supportive suspension and precise steering were pretty special and the real “fast” cars like 5.0 fox bodies or 60’s big V8s or whatever were considered a real hoot.
Now, I’m old. I don’t drive country backroads to my fast food job every day like I did back then; I have a boring suburban freeway commute. Mom’s v6 Camry is as fast as that old 5.0, and I just want something smooth and quiet for getting back and forth in comfort. It’s hard for me to see the appeal of huge horsepower numbers to just ride the same potholed freeway gridlock.
Should I be offended that for every Blazer SS that people buy, GM is buying ‘regulatory credits’ from Tesla? Musk would not be nearly so rich without our effed-up business fleet fuel standard credit system.
How government-issued credits have supported Tesla and other EV makers
I once wrote a similar article about how my 1993 Fleetwood was more fun to drive than a 2017 NSX.
My Mini has only solidified that feeling.
There are a lot of tools for a lot of different tool boxes – This is just a tool I don’t need.
That’s why I got the 2wd Prologue version.
There is something inherently special about driving a V8 car with a lumpy cam, shifting into first, dropping the clutch, all squealing tires and smoke and noise. It’s stupid and wasteful and immature.
The Tesla is better in every objective way.
But that specialness is being lost and it’s not coming back. My daughter is 9 and she doesn’t care. She wants me to get a Tesla. My partner doesn’t care. But I care.
Driving slow car fast is waaay more fun than driving fast car slow.
I get more fun driving 2.7 Super ETA straight 6 in my e28 than with 4.4 V8 in my E38
My first car was an e36 328i, and I know exactly what you mean. It was certainly able to go fast, but it was fun no matter what speed I was going. Pretty much all of my favorite driving memories were in that car, balanced on the bleeding edge of grip, engine snarling, left foot hovering over the clutch like a bug out button, going all of thirty miles per hour on city streets. And now, old manual 3 series cost 8+k, and I just don’t have that lying around.
Say what you will about Dodge and the, uh, place in the culture their cars have come to occupy, but they absolutely get this – they knew what they were building and for who with the Charger/Challenger/etc range and they killed it. None of the other domestics seem to have that level of vision – Chevy slapped SS on a crossover, and Ford put the goddamn Mustang badge on one and seems to be actively looking for other names in its storied past to defile (the next GT40’s gonna be a banger).
Also: you do not need your crossover to do 0-60 in 3.4 seconds. Unless the brakes, suspension, chassis, and driver are properly calibrated for that kind of power, I’d really prefer not to have to worry about your poorly built domestic ICBM trying to play fast car on the way back from Costco.
GM and ford know- they just stopped making cars except the mustang and Corvette so they have to put those badges on something….
I’m honestly surprised that they didn’t tweak the styling a little and call it a Camaro Cross or xCamaro.
I don’t think you can address what fun is, without addressing that the idea of “soul” is to some extent personal, and to another extent goalpost moving.
Full Disclosure, like the name says, I have jeeps- and had quite a few. I also have a 2nd Gen Volt, and had a first gen. Namesake again, I own(ed) various Saabs, and now Volvos. All of which I believe are fun cars.
Growing up in SoCal everything in the car world was about displacement, power, 0-60 and quarter mile times. There were Chevy guys, Ford Guys and later so JDM guys. All that mattered was those “time”s. 0-60- quarter mile- Top Speed- Nuerenberg ring….
At some point, lets say 2005 when Tesla came out those “times” became less relevant to just about everyone because our soon to be overlord Musk became obsessed with destroying them. His little battery boxes destroyed every single “time” and fundamentally set forward a space race where horsepower went from 300 being a lot to cars putting out 8-900 on a regular basis. Those horsepower number goalposts started moving and along with them the “times” started falling to the wayside as production cars attainable by the masses started cranking out hypercar beating times to the proletariat. You no longer had to take that Volvo and tool to to high heaven, that 454 chevy, that twin turbo 3000gt, that Supra with 100k in mods. Anyone could walk right down to your Tesla (or Dodge) dealer and buy yourself a car that would eat 80’s, 90’s, even 00’s Porsches, Lambo’s and Ferraris for lunch.
The goalposts had to move to keep car culture alive. I hear whining, non stop, it’s got no soul, no fun. Well the most fun cars you own are the ones you drive to have fun. Know what’s fun? My tiny Volt, ripping between giant SUVs with lots of electric torque, without me ever having to worry I need to charge. What’s fun is my family hauler xc90 with a 2.0 liter 4cyl that puts out 340hp and hauls ass and literally an assload of people and crap while getting amazing mileage- Fun to drive- while “Babying”. My Jeeps well those are just the swiss army knives of fun- they really do go anywhere and do anything and are convertible to boot. (yes I have a Gladiator- that I tow a horse trailer with…. and with the top down, it does get a bit smelly).
The goalposts are now completely nebulous. They went from hard numbers and “times” to “Fun” and “Soul”, things that mean different things to different people. They weren’t subjective before, now they are. And now they are weaponized: your Tesla doesn’t have soul, that’s not a real SS because… stuffs and intangibles….. Everyone has become a gatekeeper because nothing is concrete anymore.
I look at this thing and I see fun. 615hp in Houston traffic fun. Long stretches of open highway passing trucks and overtaking road boulders fun, hooning with my labs and a kid or 2 in the back fun. Opinions are all we have now or else we’d all just be driving Corvettes and minivans, because there’s no rational reason why anyone would love anything else.
I have a Bolt EV that I run in 24 Hours of Lemons. When the steering loads up cornering at 1 G on the track, it is fun. But, unlike a Miata, my Bolt’s steering has no feel on the street on normal roads. If I could just get some steering feel in street use, I think it would be a lot more fun. Right now I’m studying suspension engineering as a hobby, and this winter I plan to tear the car apart in the garage and see if I can rebuild it to be more fun.
I’m a junkie for getting a lot of feedback from a car, which is why I still also own a Miata.
Fun is tough to pin down. I haven’t driven the Blazer EV SS, so I can’t speak directly to it, but I can say I’ve had a great deal of fun in other EVs. Plus, I’ve recently been able to do a little compare and contrast about “fun” on two of my own newly aquired vehicles.
To start, GM can do fun in an EV. It’s obviously subjective, but turning on WOW while driving my boss’s Silverado EV and mashing the pedal is some truly stupid fun. One would never expect something that size to move that fast, but it does. And when it does, it’s really fun. No need to drive through a canyon, just some space, a button press, a foot mash, and a big dumb shit-eating grin.
I still find my 2012 Volt to be fun. With sport mode on, and it it’s low stance along with shitty visibility, I can fly through a round-about with a tiny sense of “racecar”. I tried something similar in a friend’s 2nd-gen Prius and it just felt like I was moving faster. The sensation was there, but the fun wasn’t and I have no idea why that’s the case.
Another example would be with two vehicles I recently purchased, both of the ICE variety. The first is a 6-speed 2010 GTI. Of course that car is all sorts of fun. The next car is a 2007 Acura RDX. It’s incredibly boring, even with a zippy turbo. I feel like it “should” be fun, but it’s just not. Even when I’m not rowing through the gears, the GTI feels like a blast and the RDX feels like I’m on my way to do paperwork somewhere.
Maybe GM just managed to stick a fun-car badge on a not-so-fun-car body style.
Does your RDX have SH-AWD? I keep thinking about those for the wife, and read that the AWD can make for a spirited drive. Not as good as my GTI, but not too boring.
It does, and there’s a cool little screen in amongst the trip computer readouts on the gauge panel that I think shows the power distribution or engagement of the wheels on each side (I still need to read the manual). Maybe I just need to throw it into the turns a little harder :-).
Overall it’s a good car and may end up going to my wife. She seems rather indifferent about it and continues to drive her ’95 Escort. I originally bought it as a cheap car for some friends/renters, but it needs a few things, and by the time I’m done with it I’m not sure if they’re still going to be interested price-wise.
Compared to the GTI, it’s pretty “okay”. It could be the driving position or the differences in the way each responds to inputs, but they’re both peppy four-cylinders with a turbo. However, I look forward to trips in the GTI while I forget about the Acura the moment I walk away from it.
Just got to say that I’m impressed that your wife still willingly rocks a 95 Escort. That’s some dedication!
Thanks! It’s not a total beater, but it is showing its years and she likes the fact she doesn’t have to worry much about it. It’s also easy to park and the visibility is much better than our Volt.
Speed without joy does not equal fun. Right now I have two cars and I consider them both fun. The Miata rocks 128hp from its 1.8 engine. As Torch pointed out, it is a fun car without being a remotely fast car. It loves to be wrung out a bit and will go exactly where you point it pretty much as fast as you want to go. I installed a Racing Beat exhaust that makes it sound great as well. This is a fun car.
My new Forte GT is also a fun car. Again, not fast by EV standards, but the 201hp 1.6t with 7-speed DCT is quick enough. “Sport mode” is hilarious- it aggressively downshifts under braking with little pops from the (loud) factory exhaust and the throttle basically turns into an on/off switch. It handles well too, although I could do with a little less meddling from the traction control. It’s a bit juvenile but “fun” isn’t about sophistication.
Luxury cars have, for the most part, have been truly fast for a while. Speed seems to be part of the equation here, more for bragging rights than any desire to actually use that speed. It’s silent, boring speed. Joyless. Disconnected. And it’s not fun.
Fun is a 115HP electric motor attached to a 5 speed with 0 to 5 mph locked out.
There is a difference between an appliance and something mechanical, where everything physically interacts with something else. With something mechanical, you have a fighting chance to figure out what is wrong and/or keep it going, or going better than before. There’s no romance with an appliance.
Last year, my 73 Mustang died at the office. It wouldn’t start for love or money. My wife (whose father was a master mechanic) came proudly out of the office, holding a pencil like it was Excalibur. She said “My dad taught me what to do when this happens!” She then proceeded to remove the air filter cover, and stick the pencil into the carb to hold the choke open. That’s a lost art.
Another time, I had a bad condenser. Luckily I had an extra one in the car.
Another time, the power brake booster had a leak. The power brakes worked, but the car would die if I held the brake at a light.
Diagnosing this stuff wasn’t the result of plugging in a computer to check the sensors and computer; it was old fashioned medicine. It was a doctor checking the patient, and having a fund of knowledge to be able to put together symptoms and figure out causes.
I think a lot of that is lost, or the perception is that it is lost, with electrical appliances. That’s not to say that electrical appliances don’t have their place; my new car better start, stop, and do everything that it’s supposed to do without question. But you have a relationship with your old mechanical car or motorcycle, where you reach an understanding. “I’ll tickle your carbs for a 4 count, kick you over softly once or twice, and twist your throttle just a bit, and you agree to start. I’ll agree to let you run for a little bit to warm up before I take you off the center stand, or blip your throttle. You agree that after about a minute, we should be all set.”
“…because these cars were loud, growly things that vibrated and shook like they had perpetual armored weasel fights going on under the hood.”
Times they are-a changin’. All of that is exactly what I’m glad to leave behind. It sounds like Stockholm syndrome.
“It’s SUPPOSED to smell like that! OF COURSE it rattles windows just off idle!”
Nope. It actually was a bug, not a feature.
This could be said about ANY EV (and actually a whole lot of ICE vehicles out there as well), yet I find it curious that this rant was specifically done on one about a GM product.
Jason, your bias is showing. You guys always have to sandbag GM products.
There are lots of EVs with hundreds more horsepower than they really “need” and will be used for mundane tasks 99.9% of the time, and yet you specifically chose to rant about the state of the industry on one of GM’s more important product launches. You’d never even consider this type of rant for a launch of your beloved VW even though I am sure the German marketers used similar buzzwords in their press releases.
I personally haven’t detected this anti-GM bias ( the removal of CarPlay/Android Auto is objectively bonkers IMO) but would guess the thing that triggered this criticism is “SS”. Volkswagen is not saying “Hey, here’s our new electric muscle car” like GM and Dodge are, so to me it does feel like a different standard. GM is kind of asking for it by using this very-explicitly-muscle-cars badge.
That said, I’m not sure SS has meant that much in the last few decades anyway, and VW could decide to got for some all-electric GTI (which is the closest they’ve got o SS…?), but hey.
You haven’t detected an anti-GM bias?
Look again. Go look at reviews of Teslas, Lucids, Rivians and a couple of BMWs and none of them have CP and AA and yet the only time that decision becomes a massive issue for the press is when GM decides to not support CP or AA. At least with GM’s system you can still install the same apps you’d be running on your phone, but instead run that app natively. Non-issue for every other company, big huge, massive problem when GM does the same. That’s called bias.
I don’t see the bias either but I admit that I don’t read all the reviews posted. That said Torch wrote a whole article last summer about “stupid and insane” decisions to not include CP and AA in Rivian vehicles. Like it or not, UX and digitization decisions are critical to how we experience our vehicles now and calling out stupid UX decisions is part of reviewing a car these days.
I’m with you. This has all the character of most EVs…but calling it an SS is the main gripe. It is ALMOST akin to Ford using Mustang for the Mach-E. SS used to mean muscle, just like Mustang used to only mean Pony Car.
Fun and everything else aside, I really just don’t like it. It’s got a cool drivetrain I guess, but no redeeming qualities beyond that. I especially dislike the way the front looks so busy despite being monotone.
Sort of agree about the lack of drama being a bummer, but I feel a bit like the inability to use it’s potential and the unlikelyness of it’s owners to go and do canyon runs on the regular applies to every single modern performance suv/sport sedan regardless of power train.
In my opinion, it’s the same thing as those people who drive around F-250s and F-350s everyday because they tow their boat to a lake four times per year or whatever.
I don’t care, it’s their choice and their money. But buying an extreme car for the edge cases seems silly to me.
How dare you!
I’m sure they also buy mulch once a year too.
I feel bad for people who actually need a truck to do work with all of the suburban dads buying in and spiking prices.
On the upshot, there will be a LOT of gently used used trucks on the market in the coming years. Just throw away the useless tonneau cover and you’ll have a spotless bed–into which you can throw rusted old car parts, manure, rocks, busted concrete chunks, firewood and and other nasty stuff.
Part of fun in a vehicle is giving the impression that you are or are about to do something ‘wrong’.
GM knows it can’t make a good, differentiated car, and that is why it is insisting on the SDV strategy and negatively differentiating itself with the lack of Android Auto and CarPlay.
Good points Jason. If you were to dilute the electric car experience down to a go-kart *then* it becomes fun. People forget the majority of “muscle cars” sold were stripped down basic sedans with massive motors. The hallowed 80s era Japanese cars were lightweight cheap cars with refined engines. We’re still waiting for a cheap-ass e-car to excite the masses and it will likely be something more akin to the new Slate, but even that has too much computer assisted oversight over the driving experience to make it “fun”. Few things are ever fun with somebody always looking over your shoulder.
Unless the authority always looking over your shoulder is only there to provide depth by being offended at the “fun” being had and being powerless to intervene.
My wheels were spinning and emitting plumes of smoke? Sorry officer, I swear I didn’t know. I was *trying* to go forward but the car didn’t appear to be moving so, hearing nothing, I gave it more. Honest! (guilty grin).
This piece could be about any EV. No matter how fast they are something is missing, they can’t shake the feel of an appliance. Sometimes you need an appliance though I guess.
Nailed it. Great insight Jason.
I’m beginning to think EVs might be more fun if they were front wheel drive with fairly skinny tires that would turn into smoke whenever you matted the go pedal. It would certainly be safer than going zero to sixty in three heartbeats or less.
They made these! First gen Leaf’s. (smoked front tires optional, but not really)
Also Spark EVs!
Ehhhh. That’s an old-man take and I don’t think a lot of younger car enthusiasts would relate. There are millions of people of driving age and enough earning potential to buy this who have only known quieter, fuel-injected, safe, reliable, emissions-compliant cars.
The loud, antisocial, vibrating, annoying Charger/Challenger/Corvette crowd has been dwindling for decades. The younger folks have little nostalgia for something they didn’t experience–dialup internet, CRT TVs, VCRs, smart phones with physical keyboards, floppy disks, separate MP3 players, corded phones, with a few bizarre exceptions like cassettes and LPs.
I’m about your age and while I enjoy my old V8s’ rumble, I’d find driving a lot more fun if it made no noise whatsoever.
To me this car sounds less fun because it’s tall, and it’s more fun to be low to the ground when you’re going fast. But it sounds plenty fun.
You’re kidding, right? Millenials are incredibly nostalgic for all the things you just mentioned. Tons of younger car enthusiasts crap on EVs all the time. Tiktok and YouTube shorts are full of Gen Zs shitting on them.
The kids may be alright.
I’m a milennial who loves cars and owns a motorcycle, but still thinks very loud ones are dumb and annoying. Some people are into it, some aren’t.
Millennial here! I took the subtle aftermarket exhaust off my mint NA Miata due to it droning and replaced it with a stock exhaust. I find straight piped VQ’s and Coyotes incredibly annoying. Not huge on loud cars, personally.
That being said… some engines deserve to have a little more volume. One that comes to mind is the Volvo T5.
This. Loud != good, but a nicely tuned exhaust can be downright musical. Unfortunately, like in music, there are too many people who think louder is always better.
Y’ know, prolly 99% of Americans have never seen a canyon, much less carved one. I wish that term would just retire.
You don’t need a canyon to canyon carve. Any road sufficiently curvy enough will do.
A lot of America doesn’t even have that.
Ah yes. The flyover states.
Adding to this, a majority of canyons near me are dirt roads not meant for a Blazer.
I’d love to give this kind of thing a try to form my own opinion. As it is, I say “live and let live” and I’d still rather this than some ICE hypercar if given the choice.
Isn’t this what Hyundai attempted to fix with their Ioniq 5N? Adding fun, even at the expense of speed.