2005 Chevy SSR: Slick Corvette Truck Heads to Auction
No Chevrolet truck offers the combination of towing, hauling and high performance driving like the SSR.
Chevrolet and General Motors as a whole has offered a wide variety of trucks and utility vehicles over the course of the company’s 111-year history, but there was only one SSR. Introduced for the 2003 model year, this curvy little pickup was marketed by GM as “the Corvette truck” and for the 2005 model year, it packed the same LS2 V8 as the legendary Chevy sports car. However, unlike the Corvette, the SSR had the ability to tow and haul as much as a compact pickup, making this the perfect vehicle for someone who needed the working abilities of a small truck while wanting the power of the Corvette.
Unfortunately, it turns out that not many people wanted a Corvette truck, so after just four model years, this funky little Chevrolet truck was discontinued after roughly 24,000 units were sold. An average of just 6,000 units per year makes the SSR a fairly rare vehicle now that they are more than a decade out of production, but one of these high performance pickups will hit the block later this month at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Auction in Arizona.
Welcome LS2 Power
When the Chevrolet SSR first went on sale, it was powered by a 5.3-liter Vortec V8 that delivered 300 horsepower, but for the 2005 model year, GM stepped up their game and introduced the LS2-powered compact pickups. After two years of offering mild performance, the “Corvette truck” finally had the power that it deserved, delivering 390 horsepower and 405 lb-ft of torque. 2005 also marked the first year of the Tremec T-56 manual transmission option, but the SSR being sold later this month in Arizona features the 4L65E automatic gearbox.
This combination of the LS2 and the automatic gearbox allowed the 2005 SSR to dash from a stop to 60 miles per hour in just 5.5 seconds while a quarter mile run took right around 14 seconds flat. More importantly to the people who were actually looking for a performance truck and not an oddly-shaped performance car, the LS2-powered pickup can haul up to 1,290 pounds and tow 2,500 pounds.
Rare and Fairly Valuable
While the Chevrolet SSR really didn’t get much love from buyers, these unusual pickups have held their value fairly well, so at a collector’s auction, you can expect to pay over $20,000 for one.
According to KBB.com, this SSR with around 78,000 miles and a power top would have a dealer price of roughly $20,721, so when it hits the auction block at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale event later this month, we could see prices climb past that point. That is no small price for what is technically a 14-year-old compact pickup, but when you look at what you are really getting, that is a pretty solid price for a pickup that would have cost nearly twice that when new.
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