Here’s What the 2020 Chevrolet Silverado Looks Like With 30 Bags of Mulch in Its Bed

A 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 Trail Boss is meant to be driven off-road, but I recently put a little off-road inside the truck while carrying a bed load of garden mulch. I loaded 30 bags of mulch (2.2 cubic yards) to find that, whoa, the weight of these little chips adds up — I was quickly approaching the payload capacity of this crew-cab, short-bed Trail Boss LT to fill my suburban front yard’s flower beds.

Related: Chevrolet Reveals 2019 Silverado 1500 Z71 Trail Boss 

A single 2-cubic foot bag of mulch tipped my scale around 40 pounds (give or take a little for weight added by moisture), so the 30 bags plus my 175 pounds used up around 1,375 pounds of the 1,681-pound payload capacity imposed on my Silverado Trail Boss LT test truck — all for an afternoon prettying up the front yard. During the loading and unloading, I had flashbacks to numerous PickupTrucks.com payload tests spending 90-degree days moving rock salt bags on blacktop, though this time there wasn’t any help.

The weight of the mulch bags alone dropped the back end of the truck about 2 inches, raising the front. But other than feeling slightly slower (yet still snappy thanks to the crisp 10-speed transmission), the truck handled the extra weight with aplomb. In fact, the usual hard, binary-like brake pedal from the brake-by-wire system felt more natural during stoplight-to-stoplight braking, and the formerly stiff ride smoothed out. All of these are things you’d expect with more than 1,000 pounds in the bed. The Tow/Haul mode took me a second to find because it’s activated by a drive mode dial selector on the left hand side of the dashboard on trucks with the optional Driver Mode Control; on trucks without the dial, it’s in the lower center dashboard button stack. I appreciated that the mode stayed engaged when I turned the truck off and back on, and the Tow/Haul mode will reengage up to four hours after shutting down the engine.

I had enough payload capacity for about seven more bags, though not much more space in the 5-foot, 8-inch bed. However, you can get more payload and bed out of a 2020 Silverado 1500, which maxes at 2,250 pounds; the Trail Boss’ maximum payload is 2,050 pounds. The Silverado Trail Boss is a plus version of the Z71 off-road trim with all the goods of the Z71 package plus a 2-inch lift. It’s available with a 4.3-liter V-6, 5.3-liter V-8 or 6.2-liter V-8, and it can come in a few body configurations: double cab with standard 6.6-foot box, crew cab with 5.8-foot short box and crew cab with standard box. Note that the 1,681-pound payload is specific to the Trail Boss I tested with the 355-horsepower, 5.3-liter V-8 offering 383 pounds-feet of torque that also featured a 10-speed automatic transmission, a short box with 147.5-inch wheelbase and optional equipment.

Now, the backyard is calling — but with twice the amount of mulch needed, I called in delivery for that one.

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