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Auto123 decides what 10 things you really want to know about the 2020 Chevrolet Blazer SUV. When a model gets itself banned from a baseball stadium, is that a good sign or bad?
When I was handed the keys to the 2020 Chevrolet Blazer, I told myself I was Micheal J. Fox taking possession of Doc’s DeLorean. Not that I expected anything as dramatic as Marty McFly heading Back to the Future in a blaze of speed, it was just that I was aware the first Blazer dated back all the way to 1969. With a history – and baggage – like that, there would be no shortage of things to fill my Top 10.
# 1 All because of the Jeep
The Blazer project started bouncing around the walls of General Motors HQ after the company decided it needed to come up with a response to the International Harvester Scout and the Ford Bronco, themselves conjured into being as a riposte to the Jeep CJ.
Now, car historians have agreed to discern the title of First American SUV on the 1960 Scout 80. Check out images of the model online and you’ll probably agree with me that that 4X4’s look was as fabulous as it was naive. As for the Bronco (1965 to 1996), it’s currently on most everyone’s lips since Ford has just presented its resurrected version after a quarter-century in dry dock. As for the Jeep CJ, its history is so rich it deserves a treatise all on its own. For another time…
# 2 A pickup first
With those three popular rivals on posters on the design studio wall, GM’s engineers at the time came up with a (detachable) interior placed on the platform of the K5, one of the full-size pickup models that were part of the C/K family, and thus was born the K5 Blazer (the Jimmy at GMC). Bizarrely, though the letter C was used to designate a rear-wheel-drive powertrain, and K a 4X4 set-up, the K5 Blazer was available in two-wheel-drive configuration until 1982.
