Small foot print on hard snow. Trucks are not light weight either. All rubber tracks with no steel grousers, worthless on ice.
In deep and steep, or icy conditions, worthless is my bet for the $42K...
I be pissed if I were stuck on a mountain side with this rig. $80K total for.... worthless?
Way to much of a compromise to be very effective.
Regards, Kirk
Agree...Totally. Except I'd bet that fancy new truck was a lot more than $42K. I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $100K to duplicate that setup.
From watching part of the video I believe it was filmed at the Canyons Ski Resort. The ski season is over and driving on trails that have been packed and groomed all season long you don't need much flotation. And this year we've had a terrible snow year, so there's a lot less base. (I live about ten miles from the resort. Less than two as the crow flies.)
As far as I'm concerned it's a PR stunt that's very misleading as to actual capabilities.
I realize there are some on this forum who are enthused by tracked 4x4s, and this isn't meant as an insult, but in my opinion these vehicles are a far cry from having real off road, deep snow performance as provided by a snowcat.
A few years ago I bought a used Polaris Ranger with DuraTracks, probably the most expensive track system for the Ranger. My snowcat buddy, Scott and I took it to one of the places we do our Tucker testing. Totally underwhelming. If you left a semi-packed trail it wasn't so much an "over-snow" vehicle, as a through-the-snow vehicle; meaning it kind of chewed it's way along. It was so disappointing I literally never used it again in snow, and sold the machine. But I'm sure it would have done just fine in the conditions the GMC truck faced.
I'm a skeptic: I have a very hard time believing the different Mattracks style systems work any better.