2019 GMC Sierra: The Truck That Tried to Reinvent the Tailgate

They say kitchens sell houses. Can a tailgate sell a truck?

The calling card of the 2019 GMC Sierra isn’t the hulking engine or the trademark grille, but the six-way MultiPro tailgate, GMC’s attempt to turn the ordinary up-or-down tailgate of old into a multitool meant to get you in and out of the bed easier and help you do more with the back of your pickup.

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MultiPro is one of several new technologies meant to give the new full-size truck more wow factor, and also to make the Sierra feel like a truly elevated truck (and not a rebadged Chevrolet Silverado, a stereotype GM is trying to shed). Motoring around the rugged, tree-lined island of Newfoundland in a ’19 Sierra Denali, we saw what this high-tech truck can do and tested out the four features you need to know.

MultiPro Tailgate

Andrew Moseman

The idea to reinvent the tailgate was born from GMC’s innovation lab, what the company describes as its own private version of Shark Tank where engineers can pitch any new idea no matter how strange. The project spent two years in R&D to be ready for its star turn as a standard item on the SLT and Denali variant of the new Sierra, and also on AT4, GMC’s newly introduced off-road truck.

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The MultiPro can fold straight down like a typical tailgate would, but also has a secondary hinged piece that can stand upward at the end as a catching, allowing a person to carry longer items than the 5-foot-8-inch box could normally accommodate. Or a piece can fold downwards in the middle, creating a lower step for easy access when climbing up (there’s a hand grab bar that folds out, too, to help you pull yourself up).

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Three more configurations are available by leaving the main gate upright but pulling down the smaller “inner gate” as shown below above. In this way you can create a flat surface to work on while standing behind the truck, or raise a stop in back to catch items at a different height (it’s built with four-foot-wide cargo such as sheets of plywood in mind). GMC loaded our truck with a Newfoundland assortment of payload—cod boxes, lobster traps—to show off try a person might want a transformer tailgate.

It’s complicated, but frankly, it’s cool. “We will absolutely sell trucks based on the innovation in that tailgate,” GMC’s Phil Bloom says.

Rear-View Camera

The outgoing Sierra features the first-generation of this option. Basically, push back a tab on the rearview mirror and it switches from a real mirror into a digital display showing the feed from a rear-facing camera mounted on the truck’s exterior.

Under normal driving conditions, it’s frankly difficult to use; a person’s eyes must adjust to looking at the real world to looking at a digital screen every time they gaze up there. The idea, though, is that a camera feed would be useful anytime you’re hauling a bed full of gear or a trailer or anything else that obstructs the view backward, and to that end, the second-gen camera in the new Sierra features options to make the screen brighter or dimmer or to adjust the zoom to help you see more of what’s behind you.

ProGrade Trailering

GMC

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High-end trucks are getting tech-heavy. Trailers? Not so much. That bed for your boat remains rooted in dumb technology and old-school skill and patience. Since it doesn’t build the trailers, GMC is trying to hack some additional smarts into the truck.

The new Sierra comes with a center console app full of checklists to make sure you don’t miss any steps when attaching a trailer. A seasoned driver may not need such guidance, but might welcome some of the other included tricks. The just-discussed rearview camera has Hitch Mode to show you exactly how far off you are from the trailer ball, plus a kind of steering guidance overlay suggesting which way to cut the wheel. GM’s OnStar theft deterrence extends to the trailer itself now, meaning it will sound the car alarm if somebody tries to detach your boat. Perhaps most helpful is a feature that auto-engages the parking brake once you’re perfectly positioned to prevent the truck from rolling a few inches and screwing it all up.

CarbonPro Box

CarbonPro box.

GMC

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The meek won’t inherit the Earth—cockroaches and carbon-fiber truck beds will. That’s GMC Chief Engineer Tim Herrick’s favorite joke about this project, and while it may be exaggeration in the name of salesmanship, it demonstrates how much the brand is thinking about integrating carbon fiber components sooner rather than later.

The CarbonPro (yes, GMC loves to call things “Pro”) won’t be available as an option until sometime in 2019. But when it arrives it will be what GMC calls a nigh-indestructible bed, resistant to the dings and scratches you might get in, say, steel.

How the CarbonPro box is made.

GMC

Now, you don’t need a truck bed made with carbon fiber, and you might look upon truck bed scratches as the earned stripes from a life of hard work. Plus, CarbonPro is bound to be a pricey option (the exact figure hasn’t been announced yet) just to shave 62 lbs. and have the coolest bed on the block. This tech feels like a play toward the future, a way for GMC to figure out how to manufacture the lightweight carbon fiber parts that will infiltrate future trucks the way aluminum has become the material of today.

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The Rest of the Ride

Two things strike you upon climbing into the 2019 Sierra. First, it’s spacious. Even in the back it feels cavernous.

GMC

Second is the heads-up display that glows before your eyes. Such a bright display is a bit jarring, especially if you’re accustomed to driving cars that don’t project a bunch of charts and numbers into your field of view. Thankfully, a few buttons to the left of the wheel will reposition the HUD, brighten or darken it, and toggle through its modes. For driving the twisty roads of foggy Newfoundland, all you need is the speedometer and the lane-keeping assist to let you know when the truck drifts to close to the edge. Charging up a hill during the brief off-road demo, it’s handy to have the data-rich display that also shows the truck’s angle of incline.

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All automakers are turning to clever bits of engineering to shave weight without losing power. It’s especially crucial for trucks, which need to make better MPG but can’t sacrifice the torque their drivers demand. GMC’s take on cylinder deactivation (closing off some of the engine’s cylinders when they’re not needed to save gas) is called Dynamic Fuel Management, using technology from Tula that we covered earlier this month. The 6.2-liter V8 in our Sierra Denali could change 10 times per second into one of 17 different configurations, in some cases using as few as two of the eight cylinders. Interestingly, GMC chose not to display this information in the dash, though one of its engineers plugged a monitor into the OBD II port to show us the switching in action. For everyday drivers, Dynamic Fuel Management will do its business invisibly.

2019 GMC Sierra AT4.

Andrew Moseman

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Even with such fuel-saving tactics, the Sierra has got plenty of muscle to move you. Sport mode, in particular, impressively tightens the steering and throttle response. I wasn’t expecting a full-sized truck to corner with so much agility as Canada’s constricted byways snaked through Heart’s Delight, Carbonear, and, of course, the town of Dildo, Newfoundland. What a country.

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