Spend a week behind the wheel of GMC s plush and powerful Yukon Denali and you find yourself wondering if a truck could ever be more luxurious or enjoyable to drive. Then you pull into the Exxon to fill-up and reality intrudes. That in a nutshell is the situation GMC faces with the Yukon Denali. Totally redesigned for 2006 and carrying over without change this year, the Yukon Denali offers sumptuous interior accommodations, abundant muscle under the hood from a 6.2 liter V-8 producing 380 horsepower, a full array of safety features and a massive towing capacity of 7,900 pounds. So what s not to love here? For starters, there is that 14 mpg average my tester compiled during its week in the Tapscott stable. Even with GM s smaller V-8s featuring cylinder deactivation, you and your Yukon Denali are likely to struggleto approach the 18-20 mpg average range. Plus, at the current national average of approximately $2.25 a gallon, driving a Yukon Denali is an expensive proposition because it weighs so much. Still, if you can afford it and you need such prodigious towing and hauling capacity, the Yukon Denali is a superb mount. The redesign produced a cleaner, more contemporary look on the outside and GMC s designers did an excellent job of improving the appearance and feel of the interior. My top-of-the-line tester featured heated seats front and back, as well as front and side curtain air bags for all occupants, including those on the third row. The materials used throughout the interior, including especially the plastics on the instrument panel and doors, have a distinctly more solid and expensive look and feel than the previous generation Yukon. Also a major improvement over the previous generation is the instrument panel. The designers lowered it a bit to enhance outward vision and occupant accessibility. The gauge and switch groupings work well and you can easily imagine this instrument panel in a more expensive model. Performance-wise, the 6.2 liter Yukon Denali is no slouch, with more than adequate acceleration. The six-speed automatic shifts smoothly and typically finds the gear you want for the condition. You always know, though, that you re behind the wheel of a very large vehicle, if not a ponderous one. Then there is the question of pricing. A fully loaded Yukon Denali like my tester can easily pass the $50,000 mark on the sticker price, though opting for a less well-equipped model can mitigate that to some degree. Even so, such a big investment now needs to be carefully weighed against what may be coming down the road on the energy and environmental fronts.
