It will be built at Factory Zero with the GMC Hummer EVs.
Ford talks about the F-150 EV for quite some time already. On the other hand, General Motors was quiet about electric pickup trucks apart from the GMC Hummer EV. That changed with the announcement that the Silverado will have an electric version built at Factory Zero, side by side with the Hummer EV. It will also have more “than 400 miles on a full charge.”
Until now, all we had were images of another electric pickup truck that appeared at the Barclays Global Automotive Conference in November 2020. We did not know if it would be a Silverado derivative or a stand-alone vehicle. Considering it looked pretty different from the current Silverado, the second hypothesis seemed the most likely.
Apart from the range and from mentioning the Silverado Electric Pickup will be “designed from the ground up to be an EV,” GM did not disclose much more about the new EV. One question is if this new Silverado will be related to the next generation of its combustion-engined sibling or if it will just have the same name, like the Wuling Hongguangs and the Ford Mustangs.
Another thing we are willing to learn as soon as possible is when such a pickup truck will make its debut. GM said it would deliver the first Hummer EV SUT – as it called the pickup truck – by the end of 2021. The Hummer EV SUV will only arrive in early 2023.
Considering how the SUV and the pickup truck are related, the only reason we see for that is the battery production scale. With greater demand than the electric pickup truck, the Hummer EV SUV would probably lack battery packs. If that is really the case, the same applies to the Silverado, which will be a more affordable product.
With that in mind, we would not expect to see the electric Silverado before 2023. Until then, GM will probably celebrate milestones producing its Ultium cells to the point where there is enough of them for all the 1 million EVs it intends to sell by 2025.