Although I grew up shifting my dad’s Chevrolet S-10 truck from the passenger seat, I’m not exactly Chevy’s target market. I prefer hatchbacks to cargo beds. But after tooling around Detroit for a day in the Silverado EV, I realized Chevy could make me one more truck guy.
The Silverado EV drives, then, almost like a car. However, the bed is huge, its front, cavernous. The back seat has enough room to cross my damn long legs and the cabin is quiet. It’ll power your home in the event of a hurricane and haul, tow, and cruise the highway without a finger on the wheel. Plus, it travels over 400 miles on a charge. This should be a dream combination for an American pickup enthusiast.
And yet, it hasn’t exactly flown off the showroom floor. GM was sold about 14,000 last year in the USA and Canada. The fossil fuel Silverado sells 10x in a quarter. After my drive, I’m kind of confused. GM may have built the perfect American EV, but no one is buying it.
Maybe it’s the appearance? At a glance, the Silverado EV looks like the old Chevy Avalancheand 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 cab, and a “sail” between the cab and the bed, a styling flourish that helps minimize drag. I thought the EV looked okay, but then, I’m not a truck guy.
Entry requires a big step up, but once inside, it’s spacious and comfortable. Hit the brake and the Silverado EV springs to life, sharp screens dominating the lower third of your vision. The seats are great and, like many EVs, will rise forward when you poke them with your right foot. At nearly 20 feet long, no one will call the Silverado EV small, but thanks to rear-wheel steering, it’ll zip through a parking lot like a tidy hatchback. That is, until you try to wedge it into a tight parking space.
The Google-powered infotainment system is crisp and clear and commendably responsive. It’s not as fast as an iPhone, but it’s pretty close, and voice commands work well. There are volume and temperature buttons and some HVAC buttons below the vents, which can also be manually controlled. Chevy still remembers how to do physical checks, thankfully.
nav is a google service so it works fine. When I talked about 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 display, another estimates how long you’ll be able to use Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driving option. Don’t like to drive a lot? Choose the route to maximize your time on the Super Cruise. Over the years, GM has offered many reasons for excluding CarPlay from its EVs, and this may be one of its best arguments. But it does not mean that I completely agree with this decision.
Speaking of Super Cruise, the advanced level 2 hands-free driver assistance system is as good as they say. In March, I rode the Bolt on Super Cruise and came away impressed, although my time with it was short. In the Silverado EV, I criss-crossed the metro Detroit area during rush hour. In a truck this size, Super Cruise is almost a requirement, making driving relatively effortless.
It had its negatives though. Keeping it in its lane can be a bit of a chore. Similar to my time in the Bolt, the Super Cruise could be swept away by cars speeding up and coming in from the right.
There was one particularly nerve-wracking Super Cruise moment when the Silverado EV nearly ran into a dirty paint mixer trailer. Maybe the splattered taillights threw the system? Really, though, the radar should have picked it up.
Overall, though, Super Cruise helped keep the ride smooth, although a lot of credit must go to the 205-kilowatt-hour battery pack sitting in the midships. It’s one hell of a ballast. But also kudos to the ride and handling engineers, who clearly had their work cut out for them. As trucks go, this is smooth.
Perhaps more impressive was the efficiency. I ran about 2.1 mpg, which is about 10% to 20% less than I averaged 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 doubt it. Full size pickup buyers pay one an average of $66,000just $5,000 less than the list price of a Silverado EV LT Extended Range, which gets 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, this should not be negotiable. The vast majority of full-size truck owners, about 75%towed at most once a year, according to Strategic Vision. There should be 400,000 fossil-fuel Silverado buyers ready to make the switch. And yet those sales numbers!
It appears that GM and other automakers misjudged the truck market, which tends to suffer from inertia rather than piloting a 4.5-ton vehicle. Potential buyers are concerned about range, charging and probably a few other things I don’t know. It has held back EVs in general — and pickup EVs in particular.
It’s too bad, really. Most of those concerns disappear after you’ve owned an electric car for a while, and the Silverado EV is a solid first foray into an electric truck. With a little more engineering, could the automaker take some of the weight out of it? This would boost payload and towing capacity, while also allowing it to slim down the battery, keeping costs down.
GM may face the cost issue sooner rather than later. The automaker has heavily hinted that the Silverado EV will get an all-new lithium-manganese-rich (LMR) battery chemistry that will cut costs by about $6,000 while maintaining range sometime later this decade. If these savings are passed on to the consumer, this will bring the EV into price parity with the fossil fuel version.
If revisions like this come and drop the price a bit, I could see myself considering the Silverado EV. Too bad it’s too big for the 1950s two car garage. I’d need a bigger house to accommodate my truck. And what’s more American than that?
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