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 offer about 400 miles at full charge.
The company did not immediately say when the electric Silverado would go on sale, but GM President Mark Reuss said at an event on Tuesday that the company would also make commercial fleet-oriented versions of the truck. GM has been teasing an electric Silverado for months now. It was said earlier that it is possible to release a pickup EV only in the middle of the decade and only officially announced that the truck would only arrive on Tuesday.
The Silverado electric is manufactured at Factory Zero, the recently renamed Detroit-Hamtramck plant dedicated to EVs and AVs, which GM is currently rebuilding at a cost of more than $ 2 billion. This is the same factory where GM is going to build the fully electric Hummer SUV and Hummer pickup.
An electric Silverado is a big step for GM and its Chevy brand – the carmaker plans to sell around 30 electric vehicles worldwide by 2025 – but this is not too surprising, as rival Ford already has an electric F-150 in progress. The electric pickup from Ford is available next year. The Silverado is so important to GM that it currently sells versions of the truck that are missing a microchip that helps improve fuel economy thanks to the global shortage of semiconductors.
Quite a few other electric pickups are expected to hit the market in the next few years. Rivian’s R1T bakkie is available later this year. Tesla’s Cybertruck is supposed to start transporting sometime by the end of this year or early 2022. GM’s own electric Hummer pickup is meant to be bought at about the same time.
Many other startups are also working on electric pickups, including Lordstown Motors, which is supported by GM and plans to manufacture its trucks in the former factory in the former factory in Lordstown, Ohio. GM was at one point negotiating to take a stake in the start-up of electric trucks Nikola, who was working on a pickup before falling into a scandal. Previously, GM apparently wanted an exclusive agreement with Rivian, which left room for Ford to work with the EV startup.
The Silverado EV will undoubtedly be a flagship vehicle of the custom electric vehicle platform that GM announced last year called the Ultium. The Ultium platform is designed to be modular, which will power most of GM’s upcoming electric vehicles. The company has promised that the platform in the largest configurations can offer as much as 400 kilometers range, and that the trucks built on Ultium will feature 800 volt architecture that can charge really fast.