Although I grew up shifting my dad’s Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck from the passenger seat, I’m not exactly Chevy’s target market. I favor hatchbacks over cargo beds. But after tooling around Detroit for a day in the Silverado EV, I realized that Chevy might make a truck guy out of me yet.
The Silverado EV drives, well, almost like a car. Yet the bed is massive, its frunk, cavernous. The back seat has enough room for me to cross my cursedly long legs, and the cabin is quiet. It’ll power your house in case of a hurricane, and it’ll haul, tow, and navigate down the freeway without a finger on the steering wheel. Plus it travels over 400 miles on a charge. That should be a dream combination for an American pickup lover.
And yet, it hasn’t exactly been flying out of showrooms. GM sold about 14,000 last year in the U.S. and Canada. The fossil fuel Silverado sells 10 times that in a quarter. After my drive, I’m kind of stumped. GM might have made the perfect American EV, but nobody’s buying it.
Maybe it’s the looks? At a glance, the Silverado EV resembles the old Chevy Avalanche, and whether that’s a good thing depends on how you felt about the original. Like the Avalanche, the Silverado EV has four doors, a short bed that can be extended into the cabin, and a “sail” between the cabin and the bed, a stylistic flourish that helps minimize drag. I thought the EV looked fine, but then, I’m not a truck guy.
Getting in requires a big step up, but once inside, it’s spacious and comfortable. Press the brake and the Silverado EV springs to life, with crisp screens dominating the lower third of your vision. The seats are great, and like many EVs, it’ll surge forward when poked with your right foot. At almost 20 feet long, no one will call the Silverado EV small, but thanks to rear-wheel steering, it’ll wind its way through a parking lot like a tidy hatchback. That is, until you try to wedge it into a narrow parking space.
The Google-powered infotainment system is crisp and clear and commendably responsive. It’s not quite as speedy as an iPhone, but it’s darn close, and the voice commands work well. There are volume and temperature knobs and some HVAC buttons below the vents, which can also be manually directed. Chevy still remembers how to make physical controls, thankfully.
The nav is a Google service, so it works well. When I spoke my destination, it offered a selection of routes, just like Google Maps does on your phone, but with a twist: Below the usual time-to-destination readout, another estimates how long you’ll be able to use Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driving option. Don’t feel like driving much? Pick the route to maximize time spent in Super Cruise. Over the years, GM has offered many reasons why it excised CarPlay from its EVs, and this might be one of its better arguments. Doesn’t mean I fully agree with that decision, though.
Speaking of Super Cruise, the hands-free, Level 2 advanced driver-assistance system is as good as they say. In March, I drove the Bolt with Super Cruise and came away impressed, though my time with it was short. With the Silverado EV, I traversed the Detroit metro area during peak commuting hours. In a truck of this size, Super Cruise is almost a requirement, making the drive relatively stress free.
It had its downsides, though. Keeping it in its lane can be a bit of a chore. Similar to my time in the Bolt, Super Cruise could be caught off guard by cars speeding up and cutting in from the right.
There was one particular nerve-wracking Super Cruise moment when the Silverado EV nearly plowed into a dirty paint mixer trailer. Perhaps the paint-splattered taillights threw the system? Really, though, the radar should have caught it.
Overall, though, Super Cruise helped keep the ride smooth, though a lot of credit should go to the 205 kilowatt-hour battery pack sitting midships. It’s one hell of a ballast. But also kudos to the ride and handling engineers, who clearly had their work cut out. As trucks go, this one is smooth.
Perhaps more impressive was the efficiency. I clocked about 2.1 miles per kilowatt-hour, which is about 10% to 20% less than I average in my Audi e-tron, a smaller vehicle with much less frontal area pushing against the wind.
So why the slow sales?
Some observers have blamed the Silverado EV’s high price, but I’m doubtful. Full-size pickup buyers shell out an average of $66,000, just $5,000 shy of the list price of a Silverado EV LT Extended Range, which nets 410 miles on a full-charge. (The LT Max Range I tested will go another 68 miles but costs $20,000 more.)
People also blame the EV’s mediocre towing range, which is 60% shorter. Again, that shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. The vast majority of full-size truck owners, about 75%, tow at most once per year, according to Strategic Vision. There should be 400,000 fossil fuel-powered Silverado buyers ready to make the switch. And yet those sales figures!
It appears that GM and other automakers misjudged the truck market, which tends to suffer from inertia, and not the kind that comes from piloting a 4.5 ton vehicle. Potential buyers fret about range, about charging, and probably a few other things I’m not aware of. It has held back EVs generally — and EV pickups especially.
It’s too bad, really. Most of those concerns melt away after owning an EV for a while, and the Silverado EV is a solid first draft of an electric pickup truck. With a little more engineering, could the automaker wring some weight out of it? That would boost payload and towing capacity while also allowing it to slim down the battery, cutting costs.
GM might address the cost issue sooner rather than later. The automaker has heavily hinted that the Silverado EV will receive an entirely new battery chemistry, lithium-manganese-rich (LMR), that will slash costs by about $6,000 while preserving the range sometime later this decade. If those savings carry through to the consumer, that would bring the EV to price parity with the fossil fuel version.
If such revisions come and do lower the price a bit, I could even see myself considering the Silverado EV. Too bad it’s too big for my 1950s-era two-car garage. I’d need a bigger house to fit my truck. And what could be more American than that?