2024 Chevrolet Traverse Review | Consumer Reports

This is the Chevy Traverse, man. This is the review of the 2024 Chevrolet Traverse. Now, the Traverse is a midsize three-row SUV, which slots in between the smaller Blazer and the larger Tahoe in Chevy's SUV lineup. Now, for background, the Traverse has been a solid competitor, typically pretty high in our rankings, because it wasn't necessarily great at anything, but it also didn't have any glaring faults, and that made it a really good all-around family SUV. We bought a 2024 Chevrolet Traverse LT all-wheel drive for a test program, so that means it has a 328-horsepower, 2.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine, an eight-speed automatic transmission, and we got it with the optional all-wheel drive rather than the standard front-wheel drive. Along with a few options, including the enhanced driving package, which brings GM's Super Cruise hands-free active driving assistance system, plus the $1,395 destination fee that Chevy charges on all Traverses, the total cost of our test vehicle came to $49,460. Now, you might think that being a family SUV, we're going to start this review off talking about things like second and third row seat comfort, cargo space, interior storage, and things like that, but we're going to start talking about the biggest change going on for 2024, which is under the hood, and that's the 328-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder. It's a 2.5-liter that replaces the outgoing 310-horsepower V6. That's a big change for this vehicle. With the Turbo 4, the Traverse is rated at 21 miles per gallon combined by the EPA. That makes it slightly more fuel efficient. While that's not much of a gain, the Turbo 4 is more powerful than the V6. Now, when we talk about a vehicle's driving position, we're basically trying to figure out how well do most people fit behind the wheel and can they get comfortable. And for most of our drivers, the Traverse works really well. For one thing, there's a lot of headroom. I don't have any center console intrusion with my right knee. This is a big pet peeve of mine is when my knee is up against the center console and it's uncomfortable. This one is ever so slightly padded there, but for me, I'm not even touching my knee there anyway. It has a wide left foot rest, or dead pedal, as people call it, so you can really put your left foot there. And then the other nice thing is it has a really good view of all the gauges on the instrument cluster. We're seeing a lot of vehicles these days where something is cut off by the steering wheel because they're putting rectangular instrument panel screens in the round steering wheel, and so it might block off headlight icons or turn signals or anything like that. This one's pretty good. So when we're talking about outward visibility, we're looking for a vehicle that makes it as easy for the driver to see out, to see pedestrians and other vehicles as possible. In some ways, the Traverse is pretty good. In other ways, it's not so great. Now, it starts with a pretty large windshield and pretty tall side glass. That's great for outward visibility. But the windshield pillars, or A-pillars, as they're sometimes called, are pretty thick, and they get noticeably thicker at the base. And what that means is the driver quite often has to kind of like peer around in sharper corners to be able to see the road or to be able to see a pedestrian in an urban intersection or maybe another vehicle. Now, as I said, the side glass is pretty good, but unfortunately, due to the way that they styled the rear three-quarter of the vehicle, where a third side window normally would be is an actual body panel. And so the result is that the second-row headrest blocks the actual third-row window because it's so far back. So it basically renders that window pretty useless. Now, we do like that this being a three-row SUV, that you can tilt the third-row headrest down so that they're pretty much out of the way if no one is sitting back there in that seat. So our staff was a bit mixed on the front seats. Some people found them relatively comfortable, but I was one of the ones who didn't. For one thing, it has too much built-in lumbar support for me. So every time I'd get in the vehicle, I'd immediately reach for the button and try and turn it down, but it was already at its lowest, at its minimum amount. The other thing is that there's a bit of a lumpiness to the seat back in terms of the way the seams and the padding is that just kind of got a little uncomfortable for me. And the bottom cushion also doesn't have very much in the way of lateral support. The side bolsters are pretty weak. So your legs might go out to the side more than you like. It's also a bit surprising that for $50,000, that the front passenger seat has all manual controls. Usually you'd get at least a power seat back or something like that, and maybe power fore and aft. And this doesn't have that. So it's all manual stuff. So in general, the captain's chairs that we have in our tested Traverse are pretty good. I mean, the positives are that there's a ton of headroom and there's also really good foot space underneath the front seats. And the seat back is pretty easy to recline by just using a lever on the side of the bottom cushion. Oddly though, to move the seat fore and aft, the lever to do that is way down here. So it's a bit awkward to move it back and forth. The captain's chair has this inner armrest that is adjustable up and down. The position isn't adjustable. So it's either upwards down and it's on the narrow side. So it's just not super comfortable to have your elbow on. So as with most midsize SUVs, it's pretty easy to get in and out of the Traverse, especially the first and second rows. The second row here, you've got this nice grab handle and the seats are about hip height. So you can kind of just slide over and onto them. But where it gets a little more complicated is getting into the third row. Now, because this has captain's chairs, you actually can kind of slide in between the two seats. There's room there if you're a little bit on the flexible side, or you can move the seat forwards. Now, Traverse is a little more old school in a sense. It doesn't have a simple push button setup like some of its competitors where you push a button and the seat moves forward on its own. You just use a lever, but then you're left with this very wide opening to get in and out. So you can kind of do it either way, go in between or just go right here. This is actually one of the roomier third rows. I mean, headroom is pretty good for adults and there's actually a fair amount of space underneath the second row seats, but how much space you really have back here is very dependent on how generous this person right here is with the second row, because if they have it pretty far back, then you're not gonna have any knee room whatsoever. And one of the things that makes this better than a lot of third rows is that the seat itself is a little higher off the floor. So while you still don't really have any under leg support, your knees aren't quite as up in the air in an uncomfortable bend as with a lot of third rows. Now the seat itself, the padding is actually reasonably comfortable, but again, as with most third rows, it's very, very flat. So there's really not much in the way of support or anything to hold you in place. And the other bit of a bummer, but pretty common, is that the outer armrest is just plastic. So the Traverse actually has one of the larger cargo areas behind the third row. Usually with a midsize three row SUV, there just isn't much space to put anything, but here that's pretty reasonable. Plus there's another underfloor storage compartment that's good sized right here. Another thing that we noticed is the carpeting back here is of a pretty high quality. Sometimes automakers kind of cheap out a little bit and just barely put a lining on the cargo floor, but this is pretty nice. And of course, if you fold the third and second rows down, you've got a flat load floor and tons of space to haul stuff. So of course this is a consumer report, so you know we're gonna talk about the usability of the controls. And there's certain aspects of the Traverses that are actually pretty good. For instance, this is a nice large infotainment screen. It's angled toward the driver rather than just being flat on the dash like that. And because it's large, it has some nice large icons for you to very easily press on. We like all that. But there are some other just odd controls. Some of them a little bit minor, some of them major. For instance, Chevy does the wiper controls a little different than a lot of automakers. A lot of times they're over here on the right stock, but this is where the electronic gear selector is, so they couldn't put it over here. So it's over here and now you've got these two thumb wheels. This one over here is for the front windshield and then the one over here is for the rear wiper. And it just gets a little confusing because they're right on top of each other as to which one you're pressing. And then you'll also have to get familiar with the fact that pressing this button here does the one swipe. Usually you press down or pull up on the stock, but I will say I actually got used to that pretty quickly. And I think it works pretty well. And also if you hold it and press it, then it also does the windshield washer fluid. So I think that aspect, while it takes some familiarity, it actually isn't terrible. Then some other things that don't make as much sense. For instance, the emergency flashers button is way up here on the overhead console. That is totally out of the driver's line of sight. It should be somewhere like here or here or even down here. So that's not the greatest. And then you can't manually control the shifting unless you first press this L button. So you have to know what this L button means. Now, the reason why they did that would be because Chevy has volume and track skip controls on the back of the steering wheel. You're trying to use those and you hit the paddle shifter by mistake. And I think they're trying to avoid that, but it's still, for those of us that do use them on a semi-regular basis, it's annoying that you have to first press this button to then press any of the other ones. So another kind of probably minor issue is that the drive mode button is over here on the driver's left dash. So not only is that out of your sight, but when you press it, the display comes up on the center infotainment screen. There's some tiny little icons over here in the instrument screen, but you're not gonna know what those mean at first. So the proximity between where the button is being pressed and where you're looking is just quite far. We see this in a fair amount of vehicles, but this is one of the more egregious ones is that the start button is completely hidden behind the steering wheel. So it's just one of those things where you have to look around every time you wanna start the car to get going. So there's some nice redundancy with the climate controls. You can either use the ones up here on the screen, or you can use the physical ones down here. The downside to the physical controls is that they're a little bit on the low side. So that's why I think some people were more apt to use the ones up here. But as you can see, there's kind of a lot going on here. So the touchscreen is a little bit busy. So there really isn't a perfect scenario. Busyness or too low. In terms of active safety and driver assistance systems, the Traverse comes standard with automatic emergency braking with pedestrian and cyclist detection, blind spot warning, rear cross traffic warning, reverse automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, lane keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control, and automatic high beams. We think the Traverse remains a solid competitor in the three-row midsize SUV segment. It's pretty much competent across the board. It's super roomy. It's comfortable. It has a really good mix of ride versus handling. But you do want to take the Traverse for a test drive before you buy one, because you want to make sure you're OK with how the engine sounds. For more on three-row midsize SUVs, check out consumerreports.org.