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Pop quiz, hotshot: What’s the quickest way to haul a few thousand pounds? Let’s review the options, because against all odds, on the eve of the electric car revolution, the limited-edition performance pickup truck market is somehow expanding. And the 800-horsepower Chevrolet Yenko/SC Silverado just might be the ultimate expression of unbridled excess as of early 2018.
Brought to us by the fine people at Specialty Vehicle Engineering, the same company behind the bonkers 1,000-horsepower Yenko Stage II Camaro we covered earlier in the week, the Yenko/SC Silverado is the street performance truck that General Motors never had the guts to make. It’s also an homage to legendary racer and Chevy dealer Don Yenko, who’s revered for creating his own line of monster Camaros when GM refused to build them at the factory in the Sixties.
The formula is simple: SVE takes a 2018 Chevrolet Silverado Z71 4×4 in its basic short bed-standard cab configuration and tosses a supercharged 6.8-liter V8 engine under the hood. The engine itself packs a host of mechanical upgrades that help boost its output to an eye-popping 800 horsepower and 750 pound-feet of torque, along with a custom-built stainless steel exhaust system to really let it sing. Easy (and American) as apple pie, right?
SVE makes a few other enhancements, though. The company lowers the ride height by a few inches and adds a custom front sway bar to keep the Yenko/SC Silverado from bouncing off the road. Six-piston Brembo brakes are there to help when things get hairy. And there are a ton of custom cosmetic upgrades available, including the stripe graphics, Yenko badging, and leather seats with houndstooth inserts.
You can get the truck in any factory color…though we think black looks the best and serves as a fitting tribute to the 454SS, the last full-size performance pickup offered directly by GM.
All this fun has a price, of course. You have to first purchase the base truck through a Chevrolet dealer, which costs around $46,000 with the required Performance Parts brake upgrade kit. On top of that, the Yenko/SC upgrades will run you another $46,995, meaning this rig is awfully close to crossing the magic $100,000 mark that’s proven a tough pill to swallow for pickup trucks until recently. It’s also a hair more expensive than some of the other dealer-built performance trucks that we’ve featured recently.
But the Yenko name doesn’t come cheap, and at least it comes with a 3-year/36,000 mile warranty. Plus, we think that houndstooth interior looks the business. And then there’s the exclusivity—SVE will only be making 25 of these trucks, and with the current generation of Silverados set to exit stage left later this year, there won’t be another run that looks quite like this one.
