2024 Trax: Honey, Chevrolet shrunk the Trailblazer!

Chevrolet’s tiniest SUV may have finally grown out of its awkward, adolescent stage. The best part? It’s still cheap.

The 2024 vehicle shares nothing but name with the outgoing Trax, a mini-SUV that was essentially a Sonic hatchback on silts. The cheapest Chevrolet was notorious for its high center of gravity, which demanded that cloverleaf onramps be taken with great caution.

Longer, lower, and 2 inches wider, the 2024 Trax promises to ditch that top-heavy personality thanks to a new architecture. Well, new to the Trax, anyway: Instead of being a Sonic on stilts, the Trax is now essentially a shrunken Trailblazer with a $395 discount.

Looks bear out the resemblance, but this is one case of derivative styling we can’t slam. The Trax finally looks like a vehicle an adult could drive—or ride in—with dignity. The wheelbase has grown by six inches, allowing designers to suggest some musculature around the front and rear fenders. The front fascia is textbook modern Chevy: squinty LED runners up top, regular headlights in the “cheekbones,” and a grille made of handsome, interlocking trapezoids.

Along with the additional width, that stretched wheelbase also allows rear passengers 3 inches more legroom. Cargo space is up by 12 percent. We’d wager that visibility is better, too, thanks to the airier interior. The driver faces an up-to-date dash, the console fitted with a standard 8-inch touchscreen that, for the first time on a Trax, is wired for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Should you have a few extra dollars, you can even spec wireless charging—on the base LT model, too. Upgrade from either the LS or 1RS to the upper 3 trims, and you’ll get an 11-inch center screen and swap the analog tach and speedo for an 8-inch digital display.

In addition to size, the Trax differentiates itself from the Trailblazer by being front-drive only. By some witchery, Chevrolet has decreased power and increased speed: The 2024 car uses a 1.2-liter, turbocharged, direct-injected three-cylinder engine that makes 137 hp at 5000 rpm and 162 lb-ft of torque at 2500, under whose motivation the car reaches 60 mph in 8.6 seconds. That’s 1.1 seconds faster than the outgoing car, which had 18 more hp and 15 more lb-ft. Go figure.

Much rests on the now-wider shoulders of this tiny vehicle: The previous Trax sold a quarter-million units between 2015 and 2018. Chevrolet wants this car to slot third in overall sales, behind the Silverado and the Equinox, attracting both first-time vehicle buyers and empty nesters who want to downsize. Unlike those nameplates, there is no EV equivalent in the works for the Trax.

Each and every one of the five Trax trims starts under $25,000—before you add destination, which Chevrolet hasn’t specified yet. (We’re guessing $1195, judging from the Trailblazer.) Like Trailblazers, all Traxes will be built in South Korea and imported to the U.S.

Foreign production aside, the Trax speaks very well of Chevrolet. The Bowtie isn’t just in the business of making mid-engine supercars and high-falutin’ electric pickups: It’s remembering the little guy, too.