2025 Chevrolet Silverado EV LT review: This is one long pickup truck
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People like big trucks, it's true. But the swing has not been driven by consumer demand, but by bad regulations. Sensible regulations would price in the externalities inherent in big designs. If people had to pay the true cost of these things, including their increased pollution, increased road wear, increased pedestrian fatalities, parking requirements, etc., they simply wouldn't buy them.
A "free market" isn't some neutral, idealized state. We need government intervention to price in externalities, or you see distorted stuff like this. Of course people like not paying the full cost of things! They like getting more - when someone else pays the difference.
So, no, it's a regulatory failure that means the market is presenting a false price to consumers that make this offering attractive.
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And few people inside the USA will be able to afford one, now that our glorious leader has fucked up the global economy.
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I've thought for a while that trailers for use with EVs need to have at least their own batteries. I don't know if also adding drive motors and regenerative braking is either physically necessary or economically practical.
But putting a battery in the 14' dump trailer I use at work would add at least half a tonne to its already 2 tonne mass and probably add 50% to its price.
But I'd love to try driving an EV truck towing a trailer like that and see how it manages with 2 or 3 tonnes of scaffolding in it.
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Exactly. Well the Ford Lightning implementation is just piss poor anyway — towing results in like 30-50% percent f an already small range, so yeah you’re stopping to charge like every 1.5-2hrs or so.
Silverado is probably more like 50-70% range reduction for towing, like the Cybertruck? So yeah, they made a better EV truck, and then they stuffed a massive battery in it and it’s at least pretty good towing range now! And way better than the Ford competitor (and still better than Cybertruck due to the much bigger battery).
But longer to recharge when you do have to stop…
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And you need to find a charger that can accommodate a truck and trailer, otherwise you're disconnecting and reconnecting the trailer at every stop.
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You can work out the charging efficiency from the EPA "MPGe" rating. Of course, efficiency isn't constant. You'll lose a lot more to overhead L1 charging than L2 charging.
A 100A circuit might not be as expensive as you think. The labor is the same for a 20A circuit or a 100A circuit. You just have to pay more for the conductors. When we added an EVSE to our garage, we went with a 100A sub panel instead. If you have 200A service, it should be fine. People grossly overestimate the current they're pulling at home. Most of time, you're pulling a couple of few Amps. There's plenty of headroom.
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"Has the moment passed for massive electric trucks with massive range?"
There never was such a moment. Because you need to carry the mass of the batteries, this reduces to a variation of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. The way you solve this problem is typical increasing the mass fraction of energy and reducing the mass fraction of payload. EVs need to be small for the equation to reasonably balance, particularly when you factor in the collective problem of crash safety which also benefit from reductions in size provided it's happening across the board. If not, you get a race to the top on mass for safety sake, which you then struggle to pack enough batteries into in order to get reasonable range.
Problem is there is no effort to address the collective problem of vehicle mass in the US, and from a business standpoint selling larger vehicles is more profitable than smaller ones, so there's a built in marketing benefit of forever upsizing vehicles.
There never was such a moment. Because you need to carry the mass of the batteries, this reduces to a variation of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. The way you solve this problem is typical increasing the mass fraction of energy and reducing the mass fraction of payload. EVs need to be small for the equation to reasonably balance, particularly when you factor in the collective problem of crash safety which also benefit from reductions in size provided it's happening across the board. If not, you get a race to the top on mass for safety sake, which you then struggle to pack enough batteries into in order to get reasonable range.
Problem is there is no effort to address the collective problem of vehicle mass in the US, and from a business standpoint selling larger vehicles is more profitable than smaller ones, so there's a built in marketing benefit of forever upsizing vehicles.
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The Internet tis a marvelous place. You can disagree with someone on one point, clearly state that you agree with them on another point, and yet they feel the need to argue the point you agree on while ignoring the point of disagreement.
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Yes, this is the bed length according to Edmunds. I don’t know where other readers get the shorter estimates.
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Though if you want a long-term vehicle, you probably charge it to 80% and plug it in by 20%, for long-term battery health.
So you're looking at charging 102 kWh of battery. My charge does ~1.3 kW on my 120V / 15A outlet, which is still 78 hours (!)
At least the 6.6 kW charger would get you down to 15 hours. And you probably wouldn't use 60% in a single day in normal every day use, but maybe a weekend trip.
(I charge my little 75 kWh car every 1-2 weeks depending on my usage, all on 120V / 15A.)
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Just plug it in when you get home every day and don't think about it. 1 hour, 6 hours, 10 hours, who cares. It takes 10 seconds to plug in and it's ready to go tomorrow. Even at only 2.3mi/kWHr, you'd have to have one god awful commute to not be able to recharge that while you slept with just about any L2 EVSE. You'd definitely want L2 though. You only get about 1kW into the battery on a 12A L1 EVSE.
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Not any faster than regular vehicles. I've got 85k miles on my truck, 70k of which I've owned it and ~90% of that 70k has been spent at max weight and I'm only on my 2nd set of tires (mine are LT though, not sure if P style tires wear faster, but these EVs are so heavy they likely aren't even an option). As another point of comparison semi tires have much higher per-tire loads and they go 75-100k miles.
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Make something really small. Like a very small F-150. These big pick up trucks ain't it.
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You literally said that 100% of the move to big trucks was consumer preference and 0% a problem of regulation. That is not accurate, nor is your description of what happened here lol.
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Let me quote myself (with some added bolds for emphasis):
Sorry for the typo in the last sentence above (it should be "I'm" instead of "In" but I think that's obvious from context).
I never argued against your position on the size of the trucks and agreed that I would prefer it if smaller trucks were available. My comment was solely related to your stated position about a "two-seater" (which I assumed to mean a standard 2 door cab configuration). My comment was completely that a new small 2 seat truck would not sell very well since the US (and Canadian) market for pickups overall has moved to 80+% four door configurations. Size of the truck never entered my argument, you can make a crew cab / 4 door pickup the size of an Ford F-750 or the size of a Subaru Baja.
lol indeed.
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Get a life dude, holy jeezus, you care way too much about being right (especially since you're not lol). Great reading comprehension, though, you apparently didn't read a single word if my last post. Enjoy the ignore list lol
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Still waiting for GM to come to their senses and start including Apple CarPlay.
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boydwaters
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Chrysler has a plug-in hybrid minivan that's quite nice.
I often see one at the public chargers that I use.
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Cars suck for any number or reasons. Big hulking trucks for individual use are just obscene.
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I have had the 3 wt for 9 months which is basically the same truck. Price was 65k. I love it. It is just about the same length as my old silverado, the bed is 5'11". I wish it was a full 6' because I move a lot od 6 ft tables. I wanted a truck that good haul dirt rock etc but also could comfortable hold 5. It definitely does that. I love the frunk as I can keep my tools in it without having to worry about a tool box getting robbed in the back and losing space or putting tools under the seat. The rear seats fold up which allows a massive space for groceries etc. L2 charger was a must. I am on 50 Amp and 12 hours 10% to full but I rarely charge to full. I get about 375 miles on a full charge though that is limited in mountains. Rarely do I need a public chargers and the 350k chargers I have used charged from 15 to 90 in 30 minutes. Regenerative breaking seems to be better than other evs. I drove for an hour one time coming off a mountain and my charge started at 40 and stayed at or above it for the whole hour. I'd like to put in solar at my house to take advantage of the massive battery. Also have regular loss of power in my area so can plug my fridge into it when that happens. Chevy tech on it is a little suspect and I'm concerned about how software impacts may impact the vehicle long term but overall I am very happy. There are also a lot of reviews that are more in depth than the above put there.
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I believe that if you have a 60A circuit, and they install the charger directly (not a wall outlet), you can get 48A.
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Yeah. At the end of the day to try and get accurate $$ and charging time calculation purposes it probably makes sense to add a buffer — treat a 170kW battery like a ~185kW battery.
YMMV. To get a 19.2kW charger I needed a new panel, ~50ft of that expensive wiring, and a new service line from my utility company…plus the charger itself which is a lot more than a 11.5 version. That was $11,000 added to an existing renovation.
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I had to go about 80ft to add that 100A sub panel in my garage. It ended up in the $1k range.
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And the 14-50. Somewhere in that ballpark. Maybe $1400 after taxes, before federal rebate.
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Let me know when Mary Barra get her head out of whichever orifice it's stuffed up about Car Play and Android Auto. Then we can talk about GM's EVs. Turning the vehicle into a walled garden as a revenue grab is simply unacceptable and a deal breaker.
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Because Americans are morons more interested in appearances than functionality.
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Massive, expensive truck with a lot of power and range that couldn't haul a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
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Lying is not hyperbole. Hyperbole is an obvious rhetorical exaggeration for effect, not just saying some total bullshit that has no relationship to reality.Exactly. Hyperbole.
When you’re wrong, it’s easy and okay to just admit it and not keep digging.
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Nobody who isn’t a contractor needs to haul 4x8 plywood often enough for it dictate a car purchase.
But this can, if you need it to.
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First time seeing a pickup?
See that big, flat panel on the back? That's called a "tailgate." It swings down to give you access to the bed as well as allow you to haul shit that's longer than the bed.
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Omitting the fact that with the midgate down, you in fact can haul a 4'x8' sheet of plywood, even without lowering the tailgate.
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I think this entire premise is flawed. You're giving Detroit too much credit. Detroit thought they could fleece customers by making a $125K truck, and charge monthly subscriptions for the radio in it and not support CarPlay and Android Auto, and then no one bought it.
Trucks were expensive enough as it is, you can sell a maybe $15k to 20k price difference in a truck that uses a battery and a truck that doesn't, maybe more, but you have to sell it by showing how inexpensive the EV is to use, and then dealers who make all their money providing the thousands of dollars a year in service won't because they're basically making a one time sale and it's gone forever.
So they made a truck so expensive that it would fail, and sold a few as a WT that you had to buy 5 at a time to get a truck that most people really wanted, and they had to mess with it enough that the reason some folks buy a truck is not that great any more. The mid-gateis a neat design, but that's just it, neat and gimmicky, and a pain to swap out and it consumes all the space you have to store it, and it's glass and breakable, multi-step process to get it out/back in, and squeaks and rattles.
If this thing had come out the the LT mode at LT prices when they launched, they'd have sold a ton of them. Now, the era of 'make an expensive thing to sell enough to make less expensive ones' is over, and a $125k RST truck is gonna devalue like crazy. If this truck came out around 52k about 15k over the 37k you can get an LT at, things would be totally different.
But they didn't, so it's not, and this thing will rot. I know a lot of contractors who use 3-5 trucks and all of them would change out to EV if it wasn't so damn expensive and over priced and full of gimmicks. They put a lot of miles on it, and the service bills are their biggest expense.
Detroit, mostly GM are idiots, they killed the Bolt which could have easily driven the EV revolution, sure it had some early growing pains but it was a solid inexpensive car, but once they had issues they made them impossible to buy - because I tried.
I've owned several EVs since 2017 now (family of six, three of them drive) this isn't a humble brag either. I really wanted a truck, but all the trucks are priced at stupid pricing instead of $50-75k pricing. $90+k for a vehicle I'm still unwilling to break that barrier, especially for something I'd be more likely to damage the pretty bits while using.
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That said, a 19.2 kW charger at home is likely overkill for daily needs.
The only way I think it makes sense is if your daily commute is in the hundreds of miles a day, and there's no other charging access in the area.
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