General Motors has just confirmed that it is making a fully 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 on a 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 will also make versions of the truck aimed at the commercial fleet. GM has been teasing an electric Silverado for months. He said earlier that he cannot launch an EV pickup until the middle of the decade and had not officially announced that the truck was arriving until Tuesday.
Electric Silverado will be made at Factory Zero, the Detroit-Hamtramck factory recently renamed EVs and AVs that GM is currently renovating at a cost of more than $ 2 billion. It is the same plant where GM will build the Hummer SUV and the Hummer pickup fully electric.
An electric Silverado is a big step for GM and its Chevy brand – the automaker is planning to sell about 30 electric vehicles globally by 2025 – but it is not very surprising, considering that rival Ford already has an electric F-150 under construction. Ford’s electric pickup will be launched next year. Silverado is so important to GM that it is currently selling versions of the truck without a microchip that helps improve fuel economy thanks to the global shortage of semiconductors.
A number of other electric pickups are expected to hit the market in the coming years. Rivian’s R1T pickup is due to be launched later this year. Tesla’s Cybertruck is due to start shipping around the end of this year or early 2022. GM’s own Hummer electric pickup is due to start shipping around the same time.
Many other startups are working on electric pickup trucks as well, including Lordstown Motors – which is supported by GM and plans to manufacture its trucks at the carmaker’s former plant in Lordstown, Ohio. At one point, GM was negotiating a stake in electric truck startup Nikola, which was working on a pickup truck before it became mired in a scandal. Before that, GM allegedly wanted an exclusive deal with Rivian, which left room for Ford’s partnership with that EV startup.
The Silverado EV will undoubtedly be a flagship vehicle on the custom electric vehicle platform that GM announced last year, called Ultium. Designed to be modular, the Ultium platform is what will power most of GM’s next electric vehicles. The company has promised that the platform will be able to provide up to 400 miles of range in the largest configurations, and that trucks built on Ultium will feature 800-volt architecture that allows for really fast loading.