The rental car game these days is besieged with worn-out whips. Back in the olden days, renting from Hertz, National or Enterprise meant the vehicles almost always had less than 30,000 miles on the clock. These days, due to the same supply issues that made buying a new car for regular people difficult, that’s not the case. So, when I arrived at the Hertz location at the Atlanta airport, I was expecting to pick up a used-up, 800,000-mile Tesla Model 3 with a sticky steering wheel, messed up alignment, trim pieces falling off, and mismatched poverty spec tires.
But oddly, I saw a brand new 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV 3WT proudly presented like it was a Porsche or a Maserati or Shelby GT-H Mustang parked right in front of the rental office. I wasn’t looking to add onto the tab for my already expensive Tesla Model 3 rental ($72 per day, plus tax) so I ignored it and started perusing the gold isle, looking for the freshest Model 3 I could find, or at least a Dual Motor (if it was going to be a hooptie, at least it would be a quick one).
After checking the mileage and build dates on the Model 3 selection, I decided one of those nice Kia EV6s might fill the bill. When I went to get into the freshest one I could find, a nice lady told me that car needed to be charged…along with a whole row of the other Kia EV6s, Ford Mustang Mach-e GTs, Model 3s, Model Ys and Chevrolet Bolts sitting there. Finally, I found an EV6 that was at 98% State-of-Charge.
I had a business call that required concentration, so I connected my phone and spent nearly an hour on the phone sitting in the EV6 in the garage. Just after ending the call, my phone rang and it was Hertz, wondering if I had left the premises. They were tracking the fact that I hadn’t checked out. Maybe they thought I drove off the side of the parking garage because I got so frustrated looking for a new ride that didn’t have a rotten piece of pizza on the passenger seat (true story).
So, I decided to ask the nice lady what it would cost me to drive away in that fine-looking refrigerator white Silverado EV they had in the front. Her response was “$100 extra per day.”
At this point, I was frustrated enough with the dirty, stinky Kia so I figured maybe I could haggle it down a bit. After a short conversation with her supervisor, she agreed to cut the tariff down to $75 a day. I asked her, “Do you know that’s a work truck with vinyl seats and rubber floors?” She looked at me confused and was like “That truck is quick…” We’ll see, I thought. So off I went from Hertz, in a minty fresh 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV 3WT, with only 46 miles on the clock.
[Ed note: Nick Twork is a longtime friend going back to the old site, when he was a spy photographer and journalist. He somehow flipped that job into a longtime career as a hack for Porsche, Cadillac, and most recently Our Next Energy. When I saw that he got a Silverado EV, and knowing he was a Rivian R1T owner and former Lightning owner, I asked him to write up the rental for us – MH]
What It’s Like Parked
The first thing I noticed about the Silverado EV was that it looked like a modern interpretation of the Chevy Avalanche from circa 2000. (I went on the new model introduction media program for that back when I was a college student and was writing for The Car Connection).
Hertz seemed to have added a janky low-rent tonneau cover on the bed – which I re-latched before leaving. Upon opening the tailgate, I saw a regular pickup bed with no liner. It was made from metal and looked just like a real pickup. No fancy spray-in or composite bedliner. Definitely capable of hauling manure, up to 1,700 lbs. of it, in fact. It also appeared to be fairly deep.
All I had was one suitcase, so I threw that in the cavernous back seat area onto the rubber floor, hopped into the driver’s seat, and prepared to ride this truck. Once inside, I was presented with two nice-looking screens, one in front of the steering wheel and one in the center of the instrument panel. I plugged in my USB-C cable to my iPhone and soon Apple CarPlay was working. The audio system seemed surprisingly good for a Work Truck trim level.
Overall, the interior was nice (I didn’t take a wide shot, so that’s the Chevy press photo above). The vinyl on the seats won’t be fooling anyone into thinking it’s leather but it was soft and nicely textured. While comprised entirely of hard plastics, the interior fit together well and was nicely designed.
The center console was a large, cavernous affair, with an uncovered well with USB-C ports located at the bottom and front. Two cupholders and a weird little tray that swallowed my iPhone at one point rounded out the front part of the console. At the back was a nicely padded and wrapped armrest. Lift that armrest up and you find another large, cavernous space. It would be nicer if they had one of those nifty flip-and-fold desks like in the Ford F-150 Lightning I briefly owned.
My daily driver is a quad-motor Rivian R1T, so I was delighted to find manually operated HVAC vents on the IP. A fully automatic climate control system was easy to adjust, using traditional knobs and buttons. It all worked pretty well. On the hard urethane steering wheel, I was surprised to find buttons on both the front and the back of the steering wheel, a la modern Dodge, Jeep, and Ram products.
The left button on the back of the steering wheel changed the music track and the right button adjusted the volume. On the front, there were buttons for the adaptive cruise control on the left and buttons to change the screen view behind the steering wheel on the right. Despite fully manual seat controls on the Silverado EV WT, the steering wheel has four-way power adjustment.
What It’s Like To Drive
I found the drive selector on the right side of the steering column, just like in a Rivian or many modern vehicles. I tried pulling it down to engage drive and it made a weird crunching sound and didn’t engage. After studying the iconography on the selector, I learned I needed to pull it forward before pulling it down. (I used to work at GM and I know GM Legal carries a lot of sway there). There is not an on/off button in the Silverado EV. You just get in with the key fob and put it in drive. Personally, this feels like the way God intended it, after driving mostly Teslas and Rivians these past few years. It might be weird to you if this is your first EV, but trust me, it makes much more sense after you get used to it.In the mode it was in, there was a bit of creep after letting off the brake. After almost exclusively driving EVs for the last four years, I hate that. Later that day, I managed to find the setting to engage max regen and 1-pedal driving. There’s an icon on the center screen at the top where this setting can be easily changed.
At low speeds, the vehicle felt big, like any full-size pickup, but it wasn’t particularly ponderous or hard to park. It was drum-tight, quiet, and had exactly the kind of plush low-speed ride you would enjoy when piloting a body-on-frame ICE-powered Silverado.
I started my journey with 67% state-of-charge indicated, so I figured maybe my next stop should be a DC fast charger since I expected to do quite a bit of driving in the next day. I pulled into the Electrify America station in East Point (brings to mind a few Outkast songs) a few miles down the road from ATL and found a lot of security cameras, a security guard driving around the lot and a lot of open DC fast chargers. Perhaps there was a reason no one was charging here…
I opened the charge port, a big, huge flappy plastic door on the driver’s side rear of the bed and after fiddling with the annoying rubber plug that I needed to remove to expose the CCS1 port, I plugged into the Electrify America charger and tapped my phone to activate the charger. Amazingly, the EA charger worked.
This gave me a few minutes to walk around and futz with the truck. I opened the frunk. Click the key fob button twice and it pops open. But not all the way; just a crack and then it must be opened the rest of the way manually. I took this opportunity to pull the giant plastic bag I found in the rear seat area, full of charging cables and other crap and open it up and neatly stow it in the front trunk compartment. The truck comes with an Ultium branded charger with 120V and 240V (NEMA 14-50) cables with a J1772 connector. There was also a massive steel tow hook and some plastic panel doodads that I threw in the Ultium branded bag together with the charger. At least they wouldn’t be rattling around. I also placed my suitcase into the frunk area. It’s pretty big but lined in hard plastic so I imagined things would be sliding around a bit.
Walking around the outside of the truck, I found black-painted aluminum wheels with a quasi-sporty design, sitting on proper 18” Bridgestone Alenza A/S rubber donuts (LT265/70R18, Load Range E). When it was introduced back in January of 2022, the Silverado EV WT was shown in photos with molded in color grey bumper fascias and steel wheels. At some point, they decided to paint the fascias and add aluminum wheels. Maybe that was around the time when they raised the price from $40,000 to $77,905?
In any case, for a Work Truck, it looked pretty nice. It has painted door handles and lock buttons on the door handles in the front handles only. A review of the order guide suggests that you need to be into refrigerator white if you want one of these. If you want to wait a few more months, you can have it in black. But that’s it. No other color choices or options. Just two different batteries. A big one and a small one.
This one (the 3WT) has the smaller of the two batteries GM is offering. The EPA label claims 393 miles of range for the small one and 450 miles for the bigger one (4WT). The larger pack, according to data GM submitted to the US EPA, has 215 kWh of usable capacity, rated at C/3. In the EPA certification test, it took 244 kWh of energy to recharge the battery after a full test so it’s safe to assume the larger pack here is similar to the Hummer EV pack, which is said to have 246 kWh.
I couldn’t find the capacity of the smaller pack anywhere, but if we back-calculate from its 393 rated range, given that the EPA label says it consumes 51 kWh/100 miles, it should be somewhere around 200 kWh usable, theoretically.
Unless you’re towing, the 3WT will probably offer plenty of range. And *should* weigh less.
These Ultium battery packs consist of nickel and cobalt-based lithium-ion pouch cells, stacked together in modules that are tied together in the battery pack. The cells are assembled in Lordstown, Ohio by Ultium Cells, a joint venture between GM and Korea-based LG Energy Solutions. The Ultium battery pack is noteworthy in that it includes a wireless battery management system. I can imagine there is a theoretical weight advantage to this but not sure what else it’s good for.
Power comes from two electric motors, which combine to offer 510 hp and 615 lb-ft of torque. For you electric vehicle nerds (like me) – the front motor and rear motor both produce 191 kW of power and 404 Nm or torque.
It felt quick and was easily capable of keeping up with traffic but lacked the same punch in the gut feeling of acceleration offered by the Rivian R1T quad motor. For almost everyone, they’ll be pleasantly surprised by the acceleration.
Like every modern EV, there is fake low-speed noise piping from an exterior speaker, so you don’t sneak up on pedestrians. It seemed relatively unintrusive. There did seem to also be some fake noise piped into the cabin on acceleration. I am personally not a fan of such tomfoolery but maybe you’ll like this.
Overall, the driving experience is polished and refined. In addition to the plush low-speed ride I mentioned earlier, I found myself enjoying throwing this giant pickup into corners. With a ton of sidewall, road-hugging weight, and a low center of gravity, it was actually fun to drive it deep into a cloverleaf and feed in throttle through the corner.
The folks at Generous Motors who did the chassis tuning did a fine job here…the steering is nicely weighted with linear torque build up and the overall balance of ride and handling is better than expected. It’s far more composed than the body-on-frame F-150 Lightning, which feels like a truck tuned the same way Granddad used to do it. The R1T with its sophisticated four-wheel air suspension and hydraulic stabilizers, is very capable in its own right and seems to defy physics but is soured by an annoying and rattly low-speed ride.
The Silverado EV is proudly assembled in Hamsandwich er, Hamtramck, Michigan at GM’s Factory Zero plant by UAW Local 22.
The Silverado EV 3WT, as tested by the U.S. EPA, weighs 8,594 lbs. GM has said it charges $77,905 for the 4WT, and $79,800 with destination. The 3WT is priced at $72,905 and $74,800 with destination.
Would I Rent It Again?
Yes! The 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV 3WT is a damn fine vehicle. However, you can’t buy it unless you and your fleet are in the good graces of GM. Or you are Hertz.
But don’t worry, the 2024 Silverado EV RST is on the way with air suspension, leather seats, 24” wheels, more power, and all the other luxury trappings the truck market demands – along with the requisite $105,000 price tag.
It’s very cool that GM made a Work Truck version of the Silverado EV. It’s nice to see honest truck features, like vinyl seats and rubber floors. I kind of wish it had crank windows and steel wheels, though.
Ok people, I can’t believe I have to write a comment like this. Transphobia of any kind is not acceptable on this site. We love for everyone to express their thoughts on a variety of subjects, but there is a line. If you want to call someone like me a man, there are sites for that, and none of them are this site. I mean, a trans person works for this site!
If you cannot help yourself, your comment(s) will be deleted. You have been warned.
Is there a reason not to remove that account? He was like that at the old site, too.
I agree with Elvis. Delete the jackass already.
I’ll also cosign that. He didn’t just say it, he doubled down when called out. It’s awful regardless of whether there are any known trans folks here and it is made even worse by the fact that Mercedes is not only a staffer, but a staffer who goes through the comments regularly.
He regularly engages in trolling behavior, and this is the sort of thing that is likely to get worse because of the troll tendency to escalate.
Boy, I’m glad I missed whatever this is referencing, and that it was deleted. I agree with others, if it’s a pattern, delete the person.
Sorry you have to deal with that Mercedes. Trans people deserve everyone’s love and respect. *heart emoji*
$72k is still DOA for me, but when Hertz dumps these on the market after a year of headaches I would be happy to pick one up for $20k.
Holy crap Nick! I bought a Crown Vic from you way way long ago! Glad to see you’re doing well!
Look me up on LinkedIn…would love to know more about the rest of your time with that Crown Vic!
Your explanation of the rental car market says a lot about why I received the Nissan Sentra I got when my Audi A3 was in an accident. That Nissan had one working window switch, it had duct tape glue all around the rear window of the car which tells me at some point it had its rear window smashed and they taped plastic over it for a long period of time and the shiny black plastic bits on the interior look like they were sprayed down with some type of cleaner that etched the entire surface and left droplet etchings all over it.
I’m assuming this was always aimed primarily at fleet sales-certainly that interior doesn’t seem remotely competitive otherwise-what is with the ridiculous letter boxed dash display SMH. Even more than the average person fleets seem to make so much sense to convert to EV if daily mileage is within range. And with some planning doesn’t seem hard to charge over lunch at the office and then plug in every night. At least in states with cheap electricity this seems like kind of a no-brainer to me.
Interesting it uses pouch cells. BYD is dropping pouch cells because of leak issues. I wonder if Chevrolet and Ford will follow their lead.
Did I read that right? I think the miles per kWh is backwards, it’s 100 miles for 51kWh, so about 2 miles per kwh.
I think this should be posted on the sticker more prominently, I’m a fan of using mpkWh instead of the ‘per charge’ rut we’re all currently stuck in.
Like my Bolt gets around 4 miles per kWh, most Teslas get around that, granted this will only be about 2 instead, but still an easier comparison.
A regular gas full size truck that gets 15mpg but can go 450 miles on a 30 gallon tank, so if we listed mainly “range 450 miles” that’s misleading, better to know it’s only getting 15mpg.
I think the total range is important, but miles per kWh would be much more useful than the stupid MPGe rating and should absolutely be listed.
Thirded. I hope all auto reviews begin stating EV efficiency with their reviews. Bonus points if it’s kWh to miles as it is a more stark contrast between ratings in the same way as Liters per mile. Let’s see The Autopian lead the charge in this!
615 lb-ft of torque but it lacks a punch in the gut feeling that others have? I’m not sure I could ever see a point in my life where I’m so used to more that 615 lb-ft feels lacking
dude’s been driving a Rivian too long lol – this is a 1/2 ton work truck not a race car.
I was questioning this as well…until I got to the weight. 8600 lbs! That’s twice the weight of my current full sized sedan, and less than twice the torque. I can imagine why it feels merely adequate. Imagine the tire wear!
RST will be $105,000. This thing is DOA. Even $72,000 for a vinyl and rubber interior is a joke.
$75k work truck? What’s the work? Maintaining Scrooge McDuck’s pool of gold doubloons?
Tax write offs like all the other huge brodozers you see the owner of a business driving that won’t actually see work
Something like this will basically print rebates and tax credits for some fleet managers. By the time federal, state, local, and utility rebates are factored in, plus fuel cost and maintenance, it might be worth it.
Lets say you have the kind of fleet that puts on 250 miles/day, 5 days/week. You’ll use up and replace your trucks every 2 years. In 130k over those 2 years, you spend $22,750 on gas at 20MPG, $3.50/gallon… that’s actually not enough to pay back the up front costs, even if the electricity is free.
I actually started writing this planning to make the point of how these make sense in specific use cases, but the numbers didn’t work. Maybe if the electric trucks can be kept longer economically – high miles in short calendar time is a pretty good use case for EV batteries, but the warranty will be over.
Once you factor in the various rebates and incentives, it could work out. EVs are better suited to stop/go traffic and idling, so they’ll have reduced maintenance and wear associated with those duty cycles. The EV truck will also be subject to a variety of incentives, rebates, and increased amortization that reduces the overall cost to acquire and maintain.
That’s not to say a Silverado EV is the end-all of work trucks. But it can work in some cases.
You do need to factor in oil changes every 7500 miles and other fluid changes as well as belts and hoses (maybe twice?) in that service lifetime-but those are not huge amounts I roughly calculated oil changes to cost $850 over 130K. To your last point wouldn’t really surprise me if EVs have a longer reliable service life though it is a question mark. There are definitely a number of ICE related parts can start to go bad as you get past the 100K mark that you won’t encounter on an EV, BUT if you have a battery pack failure that truck is effectively at end of life unless batteries start getting much cheaper to replace. Maybe in a fleet scenario there is an argument for the ability to recycle old batteries back to OEM and exchange but realistically a typical fleet truck will still be utterly thrashed by 200K even if the drivetrain is good so maybe the math just never adds up.
There’s a lot of hand waving about “maintenance advantages” of full electric that I don’t buy. Not to say there aren’t any advantages but these guys all seem to think it’s still 1992. We’ve engineered most of the maintenance out of IC engines. Spark plugs are now iridium and last 100k+. Coil on plug eliminated wires and distributors. Lifters are self-adjusting. Fuel injection is self adjusting (admittedly reliability here is lower today with DI than it was with PFI). Timing belts were replaced by chains. Serpentine belts last donkey’s years. What power steering fluid?
7500 miles is short for an oil drain interval these days. I have a 2004 vehicle with 125k mikes and the original serpentine belt and radiator hoses. I recently bought some new hoses and a belt and will change them just because I feel guilty and am a bit worried about what that ancient coolant is doing to the water pump, but they aren’t even showing any cracking. The things I have to fix on old cars are weird stuff like HVAC air blend door actuators buried in the dash, door handle mechanisms that get brittle and break, windows that jam, dampers that fail, lift supports that sag, ball joints that get loose.
And don’t forget, electric cars have cooling systems with hoses too, and they’re quite a lot more complicated than the typical ICE cooling system. Check out the newest crop of gripes from Hyundai BEV owners, who are finding out they have to replace $1000 worth of special, electrically non-conductive coolant every 3-5 years.
As for BEVs having a longer reliable service live than ICE… I’ll believe it when I see it. I think they are depreciating faster because they have less utility. It’s not reasonable to expect several thousand cells to deteriorate identically and in lockstep over the course of 30 years. It’s not going to keep losing another 1-2% of usable capacity per year until it has the range of a 10 year old Leaf. Eventually a dendrite or some other cell failure will trip one of the BMS’s safety features and the car will be bricked.
Oh I agree with you-the better end of “modern” cars have gotten to be very low on regular maintenance. I’ll add to your point about DI that I have a sneaking suspicion the wide use of turbos may bring new ways for higher mileage unreliability and degradation. And am I out of touch, don’t ICE cars still have serpentine belts??
That’s crazy on the Hyundai ev cooling I hadn’t seen that.
And agreed on BEVs I don’t see any maintenance plus there in fact I was skeptical of hybrids for a long time for fear they’d be the worst of both worlds.
Yeah there’s going to be a lot of turbo heartache in a few years. It’s not going to be as bad as turbo cars from the 80s & 90s needing turbo replacement after 50-100k – the EMSs now are WAY better about respecting the turbos’ limits – but that’s going to be more than offset by the brutal packaging making it an engine-out/body off job in almost every case now. In most cases, the car will be scrapped.
ICEs do still have serpentine belts, but there’s less and less to put on them these days as we’ve eliminated hydraulic power steering from everything and in the case of hybrids, replaced belt-driven alternators and AC compressors with DC-DC converters and electric compressors. The most efficient hybrids now do away with it entirely, saving cost, weight, complexity, and parasitic loss. The ones that are still around just seem to last forever. I assume due to the unsung heroes of automotive advancements in the last 30 years: materials scientists at companies making rubber and rubberized products.
I was with you on hybrids, but hybrids have been around for a long time and proven themselves now – the catch is there’s a lot more variation in the architectures involved. If it’s the system Toyota uses in the Prius, it’s actually simpler than a typical ICE car. That’s not always the case. You have to do your homework.
Yeah and it seems to me also turbo plumbing and related parts have gotten more complex and or just more parts than an ’80s turbo car (though I may be wrong) but my general impression is even in a well engineered and well built car complexity inevitably adds more failure points and even Toyota parts break. And of course I don’t see anyone shelling out to replace the turbo or charge pipe etc on their 150K mileage Chevy Trax in 10 years-it’s value won’t justify it.
And frankly I’m shocked the Toyota hybrids have genuinely wound up being as long term reliable as they have been, truly a testament to toyota’s engineering. Admittedly I had a co-worker who had some weird charging problem on his Prius that wound up being like a $4K bill to fix out of the blue but my impression is that is generally the exception not the rule.
It’s competing with the $52K Lightning Pro. I don’t see $23K more value here. This truck is weird.
The Silverado EV WT has about 200 miles more range and twice the tow rating.
ooooh that is indeed more truck, I stand corrected
Yeah, but I get your point. If I were a fleet manager, the Lightening Pro would probably be the better choice. In many of the duty cycles well suited to EV trucks, that extra range and towing capacity isn’t necessarily going to be worth the extra $20k.
Agreed. At the municipalities and utilities I worked with, 1/2 tons were basically just for supervisors, crew transport and carrying gear in the bed. Any regular towing was done with a 3/4 ton, or a proper medium duty truck. I wonder if Chevy is intending the Silverado EV to be more of a ‘heavy half?’ LT tires certainly put it in that category.
The Lightning may not seem the most advanced given its shared truck platform, but it is still one of the most practical applications of the EV technology available.
Perhaps calling the F150 a ‘legacy platform’ is unfair- they must have had the Lightning in mind when they developed the 2015 aluminum F150 with its 700lb weight savings. That seems to translate to a 2000lb weight difference between comparable Silverado EV models.
Other than ‘It rides nicely’’, I’m struggling to tell from this article what is particularly ground breaking about the Ultium truck platform, other than pushing previously unexplored boundaries of size and weight.
Or, for $20,000 less you can get a LOADED Ford E-Transit with more cargo capacity as a work truck.
“sitting on proper 18” Bridgestone Alenza A/S rubber donuts (LT265/70R18, Load Range E)”
I don’t understand, what in particular makes a 265/70r18 proper?
I’m guessing the fact that they have a reasonable amount of sidewall, unlike a lot of the wheels and tires that get thrown on modern vehicles, especially EVs. Big wheels with too little tire are the norm. They’re also the LT tires, so they actually have a load rating. I wouldn’t assume that a Silverado EV (or any pickup) from a car rental company would have LT tires.
Did you notice the curb weight? Not going to hold that up with load range B tires.
Fair, but I don’t trust that they would put proper tires on. The Blazer EV (lighter, but still heavy) has Bridgestone Alenza Enliten 275/45R21. Which seems like too much wheel, not enough tire, and not enough load rating, in my opinion. But I also put LT tires on my 99 Explorer, so I definitely put them on vehicles that don’t need them.
I also kind of figured that the 18″ wheel is proper compared to a 22″ or whatever. But 18″ is still a bigger wheel than it needs.
LT vs P tires is usually not a question of load rating, it’s literally just a size question. I used to have load range C LT tires on my f150 that had exactly the same load capacity as the load range C P tires on my Honda. Because you can’t buy a P tire in 235/75r15, that’s considered an LT size.
At least in some sizes, you can get either P or LT. When I would tire shop for my Explorer, I could get the size I wanted in either. I wanted 8-ply instead of the 6-ply on the equivalent P tire.
Interestingly, Discount Tire refused to mount LT tires on my Explorer. They said the rollover risk was greater with stiffer tires. It didn’t matter to them that I was replacing LT tires, either.
A 6 ply P tire? That’s a lot, they’re usually 4. And why on earth would you want 8 ply on an Explorer? That’s so overkill, and sidewall stiffness is not a good thing. My XJ rode significantly better on 6 plys vs 10 plys.
Maybe I’ve forgotten/mixed up a detail or two. It might have been 4 vs 8. I was young and spent a lot of time on logging roads at the time. I wanted the durability more than anything else. Was it the right move? Maybe not. But it worked for me at the time.
These days, I don’t spend much time on rough roads and prioritize comfort and quiet in my tires. But I also daily a Kia Niro, so a lot has changed.
With how large brake rotors need to be on something like this, I’ll take an 18. That’s the smallest wheel you can fit on most trucks. Sure there’s regen but the disk brakes need to provide 100% of the stopping force of a fully loaded truck in case regen fails.
I really honestly believe that a 16″ wheel is the biggest that is ever needed. A 2003 f350 dually that I spend time around, rated for over 20k lbs GCWR, manages to fit sufficient brakes inside 16″ wheels. As did every single 3/4 or one ton pickup built before the millennium.
Sure the Silverado EV is heavy, but plenty of heavier vehicles stop just fine with 16″ wheels.
‘Stopping fine’ is different than ‘stops on a dime’, which will be a necessity for buyers who purchase a 6500lb truck like this Silverado, and expect to drive it like a Honda Civic.
You can make small diameter brake systems that have plenty of stopping power, but you will need extra beefy callipers to make up for the leverage of the smaller rotors. At a certain point that will impact unsprung weight, and reduce ride quality and road holding abilities. That might be fine on a Hino box truck, or a 3500 from 20 years ago, but times have changed. 18” allows for more braking power out of a reasonable size brake calliper, and allows for plenty of sidewall on today’s giant pickup trucks.
Did you really just say that a huge rotor and an 18″ wheel is a good way to reduce unsprung weight?
Yes. It’s a balance and trade off. That ‘huge’ rotor (as if 18” is even remotely large by modern standards) allows a lighter calliper. Seriously, go look at the massive steel callipers and brake drums on older heavy pickups, medium duty commercial vehicles, etc. (None of these vehicles handle or ride remotely as well as a modern pickup, for what it’s worth, regardless of wheel size. )
A more extreme example would be high-end MTB disk brakes, vs the small drums and disks on a youth dirt bike. Similar stopping power, but the MTB assembly weights half as much. The rotors are larger diameter, but thinner material, and the caliper is less beefy. Increasing the leverage, surface area and cooling allows lighter duty assemblies, up to a point.
Personally I prefer the ride of my pickup on 20s vs 18s, but that’s neither here nor there.
This is absolutely everything that is wrong with American automakers’ EV strategy. They don’t have a clue how to make them at scale so they put huge batteries in a giant vehicle and price them in the stratosphere. Not surprisingly, they do not sell well. Then they blame it on the batteries when they made no attempt to optimize the vehicle weight, motor efficiency, or aerodynamics so as to use a smaller battery. This thing is a ridiculous pig that makes a regular V8 Silverado look like a sensible commuter choice.
Exactly the reason for my rants regarding vehicle efficiency. Large trucks as EVs are a genuinely terrible application.
Streamlined long-range sedans, small streamlined hatchbacks, minivans, small trucks, small “city” cars, microcars, ebikes, and inexpensive no-frills sports cars are really the best applications for the tech. EV drive systems’ potential strengths when compared to ICE are lower overall operating costs, low maintenance, reduced complexity, greater reliability, and inexpensive straight-line performance relative to ICE. Putting this sort of drive system into a bloated, expensive, unaerodynamic, complicated, feature-laden vehicle with a greatly increased number of failure points and a large, expensive, and unrepairable battery is a way to assure you get almost none of the advantages of EV tech being expressed in the real world through the use of this vehicle versus anything on the ICE market.
It’s going to flop, badly, and all of those resources used to build them will probably go to waste.
Doesn’t it need a huge battery to manage towing any “reasonable” distance? I thought towing cuts their range in half or something similarly drastic.
(I’m not a pickup guy, but–if for everything about this truck aside from its cost–it looks like a step in the right direction for me. I’d rather see these than brodozers.)
Even with a huge battery it is not going to tow over long distances because the drivetrain is so inefficient. This would be fine for towing a boat to a local lake but out of state would be a charging nightmare. And this thing is full-size pickup, quite tall, and weighs over 8000 lbs. Other than diesel dust, that is pretty close to bro-dozer territory.
The electric drivetrain is actually very efficient. Probably around 90% efficient, versus a gasoline ICE that is roughly 15-30% in most use cases. It’s just that the massive 1-ton+ battery pack stores the energy equivalent of only 7 gallons of gasoline.
If a large ICE truck gets 24 mpg highway unloaded with the engine operating at 15% efficiency, and then tows a trailer that quadruples the road-loading, its economy will not drop to 6 mpg as expected. The added load may cause the engine instead to operate at 30% thermal efficiency, and fuel economy would then only drop to 12 mpg. If this truck has a 21 gallon fuel tank, it has a range of 504 miles on a full tank not hauling anything, but when towing a trailer, range is still 252 miles.
An EV doesn’t see its thermal efficiency increase with load. It is already very efficient. Quadruple the road loading with a trailer, efficiency does not increase, nor meaningfully decrease even if measurably so(the added motor current might cause you to lose 1-2% efficiency). An EV truck that gets 320 miles range with no trailer, might only get 80 miles range hauling said trailer.
The gasoline ICE can be refilled in minutes, but that massive 200+ kWh battery is going to be holding up a line at the charge station.
The above is why large electric trucks are not a good application for the tech. That same battery could have built EIGHT streamliner sedans with 200+ miles range and ONE HUNDRED one-seater microcars and velomobiles with 200+ miles range.
In grand old American corporate tradition, it’s a massive waste of non-renewable resources destined to fill up landfills with more toxic crap… all as a calculated move to extract as much money from automobile buyers as possible.
And worse, they’ll be holding up the line because they have to remove the trailer from the truck first, charge, and then hook back up. I’m so happy that I’m beginning to see pull-through chargers pop-up along highways, but it’s probably going to be a while before an EV owner can do a road trip with a camper as easily as an ICE owner can.
From an ecological standpoint, I think biodiesel is the best fuel to power heavy trucks and SUVs, as well as freight-haulers. Ironically, modern emissions requirements make that untenable.
Get rid of the complicated electronics and urea tank from diesels, and go to a plug-in diesel-electric powertrain with maybe 20-30 mils all-electric range that is factory compatible with biodiesel, produce the biodiesel from hempseed oil, and you’ve probably got the least environmentally-damaging and most economical means to move heavy vehicles around.
Imagine a streamlined big-rig getting 18-20 mpg highway while fully-loaded. Or a $70,000 full-size SUV the size of a Jeep Wagoner, but with better aero, eeking out 35 mpg highway and 20+ mpg city with enough plug-in range to avoid using fuel 90% of the time. That would make a lot more sense than paying 6-figures for something with a 200+ kWh battery that’s going to degrade the moment the vehicle is put together, regardless of whether it gets driven or not.
There’s all this talk about saving the Earth, but modern regulations on vehicles enacted under the guise of such, are actually counter-productive to that goal. Possibly intentionally so.
Are you following Edison Motors?
Yes. They have both pure-electric and diesel-electric low-speed logging trucks, whose range will drop dramatically on an interstate. But as logging trucks, they should do the job well, and they are designed with operator ergonomics and reparability in mind.
https://thedriven.io/2022/02/10/janus-unveils-first-electric-truck-for-australian-east-coast-battery-swap-route/
I’m watching and excited for Edison as well.
Another interesting heavy hauling ev company to watch is Janus in Australia, converting existing 18 wheelers (to electric) when their diesel engines are up for a rebuild and they’re designed for quick battery swaps with swap stations strategically placed along the Austrailian east coast too.
Don’t know how successful this experiment will work, still interested to see