Before I start in on the new 2019 Chevy Silverado pickup truck, a note of positivity: The Silverado will haul or tow anything you want—people, cargo, topsoil, trailers, and, should you find yourself in a Chevy TV ad, horses and heavy equipment. That’s to be expected, in a truck that starts from $33,695 for a worker-bee Extended Cab model, and tops out above $69,000 for a High Country model. And apparently, that’s more than enough for some truck fans and reviewers to give this Silverado a free pass. Well, not me. This isn’t some Mitsubishi econobox, where low bars are quickly cleared and low expectations easily met. Apparently some folks have forgotten, but the Silverado is Chevy’s (and General Motors') best-selling and most profitable vehicle by far. It is the second-most-popular model in America after Ford’s perennially best-selling F-150. The stakes are higher than these truck’s cargo beds. As such, pickup truck fans in general and Chevy fans specifically have every right to demand the brand’s best effort—especially in light of the stellar 2019 Ram 1500 that has set several class benchmarks, including for its high-class interior and car-like ride and handling. Instead, Chevy half-assed the new Silverado. GM's franchise pickup truck is the most disappointing "all-new" vehicle I've driven this year. Aside from the utter face-plant of its styling, this Silverado reeks of cost-cutting and profit-padding. After two weeks in the Chevy’s embrace, I kept imagining a cigar-clouded boardroom atop GM headquarters in Detroit in which top executives said, The Silverado is good enough. Most of our loyal owners aren’t even looking at Ford or Ram. We own these guys. And let’s face it, if we were relying on profits from the Bolt, Volt, Dolt, whatever, we’d all be out of work. We’re going to mint money with this truck, and nobody’s going to know the difference.”

Chevrolet Silverado, in Trail Boss trim

The problem, of course, is that consumers—Chevy fanatics aside—ultimately will notice. I know I did, including during an 800-mile round trip from Brooklyn to Maine in a $57,000 Silverado RST Crew Cab, which left my backside numb and my heart cold. Let's start with the good: The Silverado steers well, feeling direct and confident even at high speeds. But even here, the new Ram handles better and rides much more smoothly. Where the coil-sprung Ram spread butter everywhere it went, including my usual gantlet of cobblestone streets in Brooklyn, the Chevy—with its technically inferior leaf-spring rear—clomped over bumps, jiggled over cracks, and sent harsh booms and vibrations into the cabin over even modest pavement imperfections. The exterior design, to put it kindly, is in a holding pattern. One regular reader of The Drive rightly called the new face “squinty,” and he wasn’t referring to Clint Eastwood. The Chevy's blunt front end is a weird concatenation of slats, stacks, abscesses, and angles. There’s no place for your eye to rest, so it all looks like a shapeless void. Or, since Chevy is big on Transformers tie-ins, maybe Optimus Prime’s ass crack. That grille did look better in bright metal on the LTZ Crew Cab I drove, versus the black plastic version on the RST. But you can look at this Chevy’s face a hundred times from a hundred different angles, and you still won't see a handsome pickup. At least there’s always the Silverado’s close cousin, the GMC Sierra, whose styling I’ve always preferred to the Chevy’s.

Chevrolet Does this front end look good to you? Me neither.

Coincidentally, I was sitting in that high-zoot Ram when the Silverado LTZ rolled into my parking lot for its test. Hopping straight from Ram into the Chevy was a jarring experience, like a free-fall from a swanky Los Angeles nightclub into GM’s parts-bin dumpster in Detroit. That might be fine, if GM’s parts bin resembled, say, Audi’s. But GM’s parts bin is like the toy chest that you haven’t peeked in for 20 years: Wow, I thought Mom threw that crap out years ago. Design atrocities include ancient turn-signal and transmission stalks, and a scrawny steering wheel that would be right at home in a Chevy Trax or Spark. Dull, cookie-cutter GM instruments are poorly aligned with a driver’s field of view. At least Chevy is consistent: Seat leather looks like rubber. Plastic trim looks like rubber. Many switches are, in fact, covered with genuine rubber. The infotainment screen is a stingy, postcard-sized affair with stodgy graphics. The audio system is so tinny and underpowered that it wouldn’t pass muster in a child’s bedroom. In one of many examples of crushing cabin superiority, the Ram’s center console is enormous, many-featured and smartly finished, including multiple USB ports and a tooled-leather top. The Chevy’s? It looks like an Igloo cooler.

Chevrolet This is what a $65,000 Chevy interior looks like. Yes, this is the best version.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are aboard, thankfully. But neither of my Silverado testers—we’re talking modern cars priced above $55,000—bothered to include a navigation system. Instead, most buyers will be stuck with OnStar—the AOL help desk of auto-dom. So if you dial OnStar, a helpful call-center operator will beam crude “turn-by-turn” directional arrows into your driver’s display, sans any actual map. That is, unless you’re out of cell-phone range, in which case you’re SOL. As in many new cars, the list of SiriusXM radio channels you're not listening includes a running list of what song or program is currently playing, so you can tune in or skip past according to your tastes. In both my Silverados, the list updated so slowly as to be useless: I’d punch up a displayed song that I wanted to hear, only to find that a new one was already playing. This obnoxious audio bait-and-switch occurred at least 50 times during my weeks with the trucks.

Chevrolet Optional tailgate can power up or down at the touch of a key fob