A Second Year Review of the 2006 Chevy Uplander

Approximately two years ago, we purchased a 2006 Chevy Uplander mini-van. We liked the look of the van, it was more of a cross-over vehicle than the normal mini-van look. Looking at it from the front, you would think that it was a sport utility truck (it almost looked like a Dodge Durango from the front). The Uplander first became available in the 2005 model year, making this a very young vehicle.

Over the past two years, we have put approximately 25,000 miles on the vehicle. Over half of the miles are from normal small town driving; short hops from here to there. However, the other half are from longer trips that have been taken on the highways in and around Pennsylvania and Ohio. All in all, a good variety of normal miles that fits the way most people drive.

Tires - How have the factory tires held up? Not as well as expected, but better than some other vehicles that we have owned. With rotating the tires approximately every 6000 miles (ok, I went 8,000 once), they are starting to wear down and will be in need of changing within the next six months or so.

Handling - Given that this is a mini-van and not a sports car, the handling is still not as nice as expected. Prior to owning this vehicle, we owned a five year old sport utility vehicle that actually handled the roads better than this one. In wet weather, the Uplander has always seemed to have some handling issues and has quickly wanted to hydroplane. Combine that with the tires starting to wear and it causes us to use extreme caution during adverse weather.

Gas mileage - The gas mileage on the Uplander has constantly been a source of disappointment. With a V6 engine in it, the window sticker showed an estimated 18 miles city and 24 miles highway. The computer on the vehicle after every tank of gas shows about 18.2 miles as the actual economy. If we travel highway only, it goes up to about 19.5 miles to a gallon. We get city mileage on highway miles and have never seen anything close to 24 miles to a gallon at all. As a comparison, or previous sport utility vehicle had a V8 engine in it and was getting an average of 17 miles to the gallon on these same highway trips.

Road Noise - When we first bought the Uplander, we were happy with the overall level of road noise that we experienced. However, after only two years and 25,000 miles the road noise has increased significantly. A large part of this can be attributed to the tire wear, but we have also noticed a lot of wind noise from the windows and doors. It seems like the seals haven't been able to keep up.

Problems - Our Uplander has been in the shop several times for problems that we reported. These problems included: the built in DVD player was refusing to play disks (2 visits for them to agree it was a problem), issues with the transmission jerking into gear when starting out in the morning (they couldn't reproduce this problem although it happens frequently to us, so it's still a problem), the sensors on the sliding doors not accurately reporting the door ajar (leading to locks clicking and lights coming on around turns as the door slips a little bit and the sensors kick in. Again, nothing done by the dealership because it's aligned properly and we should know that the door is ajar), and problems with the vehicle running out of gas on slight downhill slope although there is still an 1/8of a tank of gas in it (we live in hilly Pennsylvania, so just don't let the tank get that low is what we were told).

Overall Review

From an overall experience with the Chevy Uplander, we have been disappointed with it. While it looks nice, we have just had to many problems and disappointments with it. The gas mileage is not what we expected, the handling is not what we expected, durability of the existing parts on the vehicle (tires, weather seals, etc) leads us to expect more problems, etc. We're starting to evaluate our options and we plan to trade the vehicle in for something else within the next year. Hopefully the later model years of this vehicle have improved over this model.