The new 1500 doesn’t look radically different from last year’s model, but it has seen some substantial design changes that make it look a little less busy and a little more sophisticated than in years past. It’s perhaps not the most exciting-looking truck, but it is at least good-looking, something you couldn’t necessarily say about the past few years’ worth of Silverado.
Much more substantial changes are inside. For 2027, a 16.3-inch central touchscreen is standard, taking up much of the middle of the dashboard and is conjoined to a second display: a 12.2-inch unit that makes up the digital gauge cluster behind the steering wheel.
A heads-up display can be had to project speed and active safety information onto the glass above, and if that’s not enough, the Silverado can be had with a display integrated on the passenger side of the dashboard. This 11.5-inch unit has a privacy filter that prevents the driver from seeing it, enabling whoever’s riding shotgun to do a little streaming while underway.
That includes services like Disney+, Hulu and YouTube, plus iHeartRadio and Amazon Music. You can even bring your own video thanks to an HDMI input. Combine that with the available three-prong outlet, and if you pack your PlayStation 5 you could get some quality GTA VI time in from the passenger seat.
That comes with some caveats, though. For one thing, audio from the passenger display doesn’t play through the car’s speakers, so you’ll need to pair a Bluetooth headset. The other thing is that the privacy filter is so aggressive that it creates a less-than-ideal viewing experience.
Even sitting dead-center in the passenger seat, the outer edges of the display fade to black, a vignette effect that I found quite distracting. The good news is that the display appears perfectly black from the driver’s screen, preventing any temptation to glance over. The bad news is that, unlike the Audi A6 e-tron or other vehicles that can selectively turn off their privacy filters, driver and passenger here can’t watch a video together while making a pit stop.
My biggest disappointment, though, is how little you can do with that display. It’s for streaming, and that’s about it. To me, the most useful feature of passenger displays is letting your co-driver search for destinations and scroll around the map without taking over the driver’s navigation view. You can’t do that here, and while the Silverado does have an AI-powered co-driver onboard that can do some of that for you, in my testing it didn’t always work.