Buying a Suburban. 350 454 or diesel?

[mtesta1985]

Hey guys, I'm shopping for a 96-99 Suburban 4X4. I picked those years because I like the body style, I know they were built well and I want OBDII. I currently have a 99 Tahoe with 235K miles and its a great truck. I'm a geology grad student and I constantly go on camping trips to do field work, and those trips consist 200+ highway miles and then rugged trails and areas were there are no trails. My tahoe is unfortunatly 2wd and its done great, but we've had to ditch it multiple times and carry all of our equipment to different sites. Plus we just got a ground penetrating radar which is huge (a little bit bigger then a shopping cart), so now I'm really in need of a suburban. I'm not to worried about the differences in reliability between the 3 motors, from what I've read the 350 is good once you've changed over to the updated MFI fuel injection (which I did on the tahoe). The 454 is rock solid but a gas guzzler and the diesel is a good motor as long as you relocate the PMD. I'm leaning more toward the diesel for the extra power and fuel economy, however I really like the 350 because I know when it breakes I can pickup the parts cheap just about anywhere and usually swap them out myself where I have no idea what I'm doing with the 6.5L diesel. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks

 

[M in Texas]

this was posted 5 years ago, did you get the diesel? if so do you still have it?