You can't see many of the changes for the new AV from this point of view, but here's what I can recall and tell from this picture and from my in-person view as far as similarities and differences.
SIMILARITIES:
- The rear doors look smaller in the picture above, but they look that way on a current Avalanche too. (Compare to the picture on the top of
This WBH AV Web Page.) I didn't recall a difference when I saw it in person sitting beside the current WBH either so I think there is likely no change here.
- If you look closely you can see that there is a lock where the locking top storage boxes are so they should remain the same as well.
- The wheel wells are not noticably rounder than the WBH wheelwells already are today, no change there either.
DIFFERENCES:
- The rearview mirror is smaller and oval instead of the larger/rectangur shape that it is today. What you can't tell from the picture above unless you look REALLY close is that the front of the mirror is split almost exactly in half with the bottom being cladding, and the top being body colored. It looks pretty bad in person, especially with so much of the rest of the cladding (wheel flares, door handles, body side moulding) already removed. So for those of you who who have WBH today and looked for body colored or chrome inserts to replace your black mirror backs, you'll likely have an even harder chore replacing the backs on these as it's unlikely the body colored half-mirror part will exist on another truck to draw from.
- Bowtie in the center of the tailgate. Some like it, some think it looks F--d.
- Backup lights are in the center of the tail light housings. I don't like it personally but it's not something that would make or break my opinion of a vehicle's appearance.
- Wheels are different (and look like the current D@dge wheels), but it's highly unlikely that these will be the same wheels on the vehicle when it rolls out of the factory. Look at the wheels on the demo AV for instance.
- The biggest appearance difference in my opinion is to the front of the truck though. The grill and front bumper are COMPLETELY different. Draw a straight horizontal line across the top of the grill and that's the line of the hood. No angular notches, no aggressive "eyelid" lights, no style in my opinion. The power bar across the center of the grill is no longer chrome. Instead a flat body-colored band has replaced it. It looks like someone took bondo and smoothed a straight line from one fender to the other and then painted it. I'm sure there will probably be a bowtie in the center of it, even though there wasn't on the demo truck. The headlights were plain rectangles with round lights in the center of the light covers. The bumper has no chrome OR plastic on it at all, it's 100% body colored and smoothed right into the fenders on either side. If you look close at the picture above you can see what I'm taling about on the bumper color. I can't imagine how they're going to keep from getting thousands of stone chips all across the front of this thing. Everything that isn't headlight or grill is body paint, smooth, and has no design details.
To give you an idea, take this 1988 pickup and paint the power-bar and bumper body-colored (black in this case), then remove the amber in the lights and make them look like one large light with round inserts and that's about exactly what the front of the new demo AV looked like.
I think the front of the vehicle is jumping backwards a decade compared to the current look. You be the judge.