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General Motors has just confirmed that it is making an all-electric version of the Chevy Silverado pickup, the company’s best-selling vehicle. The new truck will be powered by GM’s new EV battery and will deliver approximately 400 miles on a full charge.
The company did not immediately announce the electric Silverado for sale, but GM chairman Mark Reuss said at an event on Tuesday that the company would also make commercial, fleet-focused versions of the truck. GM has been teasing an electric Silverado for months now. He had previously said he might not be getting out of a pickup until the middle of the decade and had officially announced the truck would arrive before Tuesday.
The electric Silverado will be manufactured at Factory Zero, the recently renamed Detroit-Hamtramck factory dedicated to electric and audiovisual vehicles that GM is currently retooling at a cost of more than $ 2 billion. This is the same plant where GM will build the all-electric Hummer SUV and Hummer pickup.
An electric Silverado is a big step forward for GM and its Chevy brand – the automaker plans to sell around 30 electric vehicles around the world by 2025 – but that’s not too surprising given that rival Ford has already an electric F-150 in preparation. Ford’s electric pickup is slated for release next year. The Silverado is so important to GM that it currently sells versions of the truck that lack a microchip that helps improve fuel economy thanks to the global semiconductor shortage.
A large number of other electric microphones are expected to hit the market in the next few years. Rivian’s R1T pickup is slated for release later this year. Tesla’s Cybertruck is slated to start shipping around the end of this year or early 2022. GM’s own Hummer electric pickup is slated to go on sale around the same time.
Many other startups are also working on electric pickup trucks, including Lordstown Motors – which is backed by GM and plans to build its trucks at the legacy automaker’s former factory in Lordstown, Ohio. At one point, GM was negotiating to take a stake in electric trucking startup Nikola, which was working on a pickup truck before getting bogged down in scandal. Before that, GM would have wanted an exclusive deal with Rivian, which left Ford the possibility of partnering with this EV startup.
The Silverado EV will undoubtedly be a flagship of the custom electric vehicle platform GM announced last year, called Ultium. Designed to be modular, the Ultium platform will power most of GM’s future electric vehicles. The company has promised that the platform will be able to provide up to 400 miles of range in larger configurations, and that trucks built on Ultium will feature an 800-volt architecture allowing for very fast charging.
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