The Chevy Silverado EV work truck seemed too good to be true when GM began releasing stats on the truck last year. Four hundred miles on one charge? That was wild. Well, now the General says its engineers even outdid those estimates for an EPA-estimated range of 450 miles.
General Motor’s new president of North America, Rory Harvey, talked about the milage boost at a press conference on Friday. That range laps the competition by over 100 miles of range. It certainly makes Silverado fans’ long wait worth it, especially if you’re range anxious. Harvey gave all the props to the engineers. From the Detroit Free Press:
“When you look at that range, particularly in respect to the work truck which is predominantly a fleet vehicle, we believe that gives us a competitive advantage in terms of those fleet customers,” Harvey said of the Silverado EV during a news media briefing Thursday.
The 2024 Silverado EV work truck will be offered in two range specifications. At launch, it’ll have an EPA-estimated range of 450 miles on a full charge, Harvey said, and “then we’ll have other variants that start to be introduced and we will have an option in terms of different configurations in terms of mileage.”
Harvey credited GM engineers with having the “tenacity and working through all the different solutions” to surpass GM’s initial target of 400 miles of range to reach the 450-mile mark.
“We look at refinements, we look at aero, we look at the way the vehicle is calibrated, the way the vehicle is set up,” Harvey said. “There are so many factors that go into it. The team was able to refine it.”
It was already going to trounce the competition according to GM’s initial estimate of 400 miles, but 450 miles signed off by the EPA? That’s about as much icing on the range cake as a rose on a corner piece. Compare the Silverado EV work truck’s new shiny number to the ranges of the Rivian RT1 (314 miles), the Ford F-150 Lightning (320 miles) and GMC’s EV Hummer (329 miles) and it’s clear which truck is the winner in the race for range. What it didn’t win, however, was the race to market. Ford customers began taking delivery of Lightnings around this time last year and the Rivian RT1 is available to customers between one and four months after confirming their orders, Verge reports. The first Silverados will begin trickling out to customers this spring. Meanwhile, GM has a massive backlog of at least 150,000 orders.
The more upscale RST trim gets a little less juice, and we’ll know more about that vehicle nearer to its on-sale date in the fall. We’ve reached out to Chevrolet for more info and we will update this post once we know more.