Chevy just published a press release showing off an 1,100 horsepower Chevy Silverado EV ZR2 race truck concept meant to get the world excited for the 2026 Chevy Silverado EV Trail Boss — Chevy’s very first off-road-focused electric vehicle. But I’m not excited because I know that the new, more capable Silverado EV is going to be yet another reminder that electric off-roaders are just not ready for primetime in 2025.
I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer, here. As an off-road diehard, I think the more capable vehicles hit the market the merrier. And in fact, when I reviewed the Rivian R1T, I had almost entirely nice things to say. I also liked driving the Cybertruck.
But those machines were cool because they were novel, and by 2026 when the new Silverado EV Trail Boss hits the market, the glitz and the glamour associated with new electric pickup trucks will have worn off. In fact, it already has, and now that I’m looking at new electric vehicles through clear lenses with no rose tint, it becomes obvious that they just aren’t suited to be great off-roaders. At least, not right now.
I don’t mean that electric vehicles aren’t good off-roaders from a technical standpoint. No, the torque delivery of an EV, and the granularity with which it can be delivered, are sensational. There’s no doubt about that. No, when I say EVs aren’t suited to be “great off-roaders,” I mean off-road capable vehicles for the masses.
Think about it: It’s 2025, and there’s not a single off-road electric car that even borders on “affordable.” Not one. And the reason for that is simple: off-road vehicles just require too much energy to go down the road, which is something we all intuitively know — it’s a key reason why a Ford Escape gets better fuel economy than, say, a Ford Bronco. And the more energy needed, the bigger the battery needed.
So when I saw Chevy’s press release for the new Silverado EV ZR2 and Trail Boss, I couldn’t help but think about how compromised it’s going to be, especially when it comes to pricing.
Here’s what Chevy has to say about the Trail Boss in the aforementioned press release:
The Silverado ZR2 race truck concept’s reveal comes as Chevy prepares to launch this summer the 2026 Silverado EV Trail Boss, its first off-road oriented EV variant. Trail Boss is a more off-road capable Silverado EV with a factory-installed lift, 18-inch wheels, 35-inch all-terrain tires and red tow hooks. New Terrain Mode gives the truck increased maneuverability in tight spaces.
If this were a gasoline truck, like, say, the Chevy Colorado ZR2, I’d be amped to see this. 35s! A lift kit! Lockers! That’s fantastic. Sure, it’ll hurt fuel economy and ride quality and handling, but those are compromises I’m willing to make. In an EV, though, that first compromise makes the off-road hardware far from worth it in my eyes.
My article last May about how EVs just aren’t suited for serious towing is quite similar to this one in that my main point has to do with Vehicle Demand Energy: The energy needed to propel a vehicle down the road.
With a heavy load hooked to a trailer hitch, getting a reasonable range requires a massive amount of energy onboard the tow vehicle. On a gas or diesel vehicle, you just install a big blow-molded fuel tank for a few bucks more and be done with it. On an EV, you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of pounds worth of curb weight to store the extra energy needed to yield a similar range as an ICE truck.
The good thing about a pickup truck tow vehicle, though, is that it can be fairly efficient when it’s not pulling a trailer. So, an EV pickup could still be an OK daily driver even if it’s not great when the energy demand goes up during towing. But what if that pickup truck has an increased energy demand when not towing?
That’s essentially what Chevy is doing by off-road-ifying its Silverado EV. By installing 35-inch tires and a factory lift kit, it’s going to compromise the vehicle’s range by increasing aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance. The only way to even slightly mitigate that is to use air suspension, which allows one to raise the vehicle for off-roading and lower it for highway driving. Even with air suspension (which, by the way, isn’t cheap) 35-inch all-terrain tires alone will significantly reduce range.
The current crop of Chevy Silverado EVs offers ranges between 282 miles and 492 miles, and while that latter figure may sound impressive, it’s just a product of a humongous 205 kWh battery. The vehicle’s efficiency of 50 kWh/100 mi is significantly less than that of, say, a Rivian R1T (which, to be fair, is a bit smaller). The 282-mile vehicle uses a 119 kWh battery, while the 400-ish mile truck has a 170 kWh battery, if you’re curious.
The result of these bigger batteries is a high cost and high weight. Unless you’re a fleet operator who can buy a WT “Work Truck,” buying a Silverado EV will cost you over $75,000. I get that an off-road variant will look cool and be fun, but like an off-road version of a gas truck, this is just going to be a more expensive truck with less range. And when you’re already expensive and range-conscious like the Silverado EV is, I’m not sure those are two areas worth compromising for a bit more off-road capability.
I’m saying “a bit,” because just looking at that picture above tells me this thing is going to be far from an off-road beast. That belly looks big, the front overhang looks low, and at about 9,000 pounds it’s likely going to bury itself in loose terrain and be an absolute bear to recover once it’s stuck.
Back in August Lucid’s then-CEO Peter Rawlinson told me it’s not possible to make an affordable EV pickup truck without a gas motor. If you want to be competitive in terms of towing range, you just have to install an absurdly heavy and expensive battery pack.
The same holds true when it comes to off-road capability. To build an off-roader with the right geometry (short overhangs, a short belly), underbody protection (which adds weight), and tires (big all-terrains or mud-terrains), you’ve got to make major compromises to Vehicle Demand Energy. That means you need a big battery to give you a reasonable range.
The Rivian R1S will go 410 miles on a charge, but it does it thanks to a 141.5 kWh battery. And that vehicle doesn’t even have aggressive all-terrain tires. It also costs over $90 grand.
EVs just aren’t ready to be good, affordable off-roaders in 2025. But there is an obvious solution: The range extender.
Adding a small gasoline range extender allows you to install big 35-inch tires and all the skid plates you could want without significantly compromising edge-case driving situations like road trips (this is important because people, whether logically or illogically, buy vehicles based on edge cases). Instead of installing a 200 kWh battery to get 350 miles of range (for example) out of your off-road vehicle, you can just have an 80 kWh battery, get 140 miles of electric range to handle the majority of your daily-driving needs, and when you need to go on your annual road trip, you just fill up.
You’ve now saved $17,000 worth of batteries (but added maybe $7000 back with the range extender, for a net savings of $10,000 to be conservative), and you’ve dropped your curb weight by at least 1,000 pounds.
Range extenders truly are the only way to make electric off-roaders remotely accessible to the masses in 2025. This new Silverado EV Trail Boss doesn’t have one, and the result is almost certainly going to be an expensive, heavy vehicle with only so-so range and off-road capability. I’m sure it’ll be fun to drive, but certainly not fun to pay for or charge up.
Call me crazy (or a boring suburbanite), but isn’t the range problem sort of compounded by the fact that the places people go offroading are kind of far from charging points for EVs, right? So the range extender seems a necessity for getting to and from the fun offroad location.
My late father used to refer to his 3400lb FJ40 as the “Land Crusher”. Little did he know….
Considering the range hit of the off-road mods and the exorbitant price and weight of this land barge, a better option (IMO) would be an efficient set of wheels/tires on a Lightning (which has lockers standard) or a base Rivian (air suspension for aero OR off-roading), and carry a set of more off-road-capable wheels/tires with you on your off-road trip.
Now you save potentially tens of thousands of dollars, thousands of pounds of weight, and may not be far behind on range, even, considering the way those wheels/tires are going to crush the Silverado’s range.
Lots of variables, here, and I’m glad they’re offering more “enthusiast” options for EV trucks, but the Trailboss is definitely going to be very compromised considering the approximately 5-digit weight and 6-digit price.
I’m only partway through the article, but I have to share that I’m starting g to like the style on those buildings on wheels!
I never even noticed they were restyled, but it kind of works now, somehow.
I think it has to do with the fact that I can sort of recognise a face now, instead of a stacked big mac of grills, and also the sloped C pillar gives it some elegance. If hell froze over and they made a cabin forward version I dare say I would love it!
They definitely put their best styling team on the job
Hi David, your articles covering BEV’s I feel are fair, balanced and critical as they should be. In my opinion the Series Hybrid powertrain is the best transitional technology until battery charging stations are as common and convenient as our current gas stations.
FWIW – A search for “Wrightspeed” on The Autopian unfortunately produced zero results but fortunately for you and us readers would make for a great article. They are a small company with operations based in Alameda, CA. They retrofit heavy commercial vehicles like garbage trucks and such with micro turbine series hybrid systems. They even offer a crate hybrid system if I’m not mistaken.
I never understood the full size truck EVs as the main 2nd generation vehicles. Especially GM, they went from the Sunraycer, to the EV1 being as efficient as possible to get the most out of lead batteries, to the Volt and Bolt which were very efficient(to the point my 8 year old Bolt EV still has comparable range to most new EVs)
But then the Hummer…., like wth? 9000lbs, 200KwH batteries, less efficient than my 2000 Ford Ranger EV with nickel batteries and the drag coefficient of a..2000 Ford Ranger, over $100k, like no, sorry GM, the answer we were looking for was Equinox EV, and maybe a compact E-LUV PHEV to compete with the Maverick.
And it wasn’t just them, Rivian, Ford Lightning, Lordstown, Canoo, like none of this makes sense. At least Tesla had made 5 other EV models before coming up with their abomination, but all the rest were throwing logic from 20 years ago out the window and going all in on the trucks.
Ford seems to get the idea and is dialing back, hopefully they’ll have a nice Escort EV with an EXP variant from their skunkworks, and Dodge is all about the EREV since they were late to the party, but GM still going all in now with all the variants like the regular Silverado, I guess if it’s still more efficient and is just for the mall anyways that will still help, but dang you could use that power for several smaller EVs.
They make an Equinox EV. The real answer is Astro EV, small work van and minivan.
Owning is believing Driving is Believing
I hated on all EV’s untill I bought my first EV.
I named my first EV…..THE HATER BAITER
This article ….A lot of nice things said about EV off roaders a lot of “buts”to to many buts” “buts” make it sound like you should buy one, own one, drive one, romp one, hill climb one, rock crawl one, mud bog one, or just take a nice Saturday 4am ride to your favorite spot on your favorite creek and spend the day catching fish and enjoying the reason most people try to find thier way up a red dirt road 1x a week. not for a test drive not for someone else’s off-road ev enjoyment but your own. but you haven’t really expierenced an ev off roader yet. You’re always gonna hate on ev off roaders so long as one is still in your predicted future and not in you driveway. Why write about not owning an off road ev. A model y or model 3 are both can be great off road ev’s for one or two rides. I like affordable off roaders also The top of my affordable list off roader is a beater Volkswagen Rabbit with 12 inch rims and 2 inches of clearance.paid 625.00 and a pack of Kool 100’s traded to my high school janitor miss Yolandy the car not the janitor was a great off roader my freshman year of high school! Another affordable option I once took was 1,000 dollars on one mighty large 4 door LTD with a 460 under the hood, positrack rear, power windows, cargo rack and a expansive hood for sun bathing after jumping into the ice cold Brazos River, it had two batteries and it slept 6 and that was a great off roader I’d even say for the summer of 96’ that car was the best overland off-roader ever. The ltd’s body got crushed but that 460 found its way into a 90’ Restomod F250 with a 8 inch lift it’s got a rebuild overbore forged parts a cold air intake a turbo charger and 1200 horse. They put in on some 50”super swampers, roll cage and now it’s a regional champion bogger that sold for 100k. So what’s wrong with the new Silverado Ev and what’s your problem with the cybertruck? 4 wheel steering ain’t no novelty, steer by wire isn’t a novelty, fold down rear bulkhead ain’t no novelty. The features these EV off roaders have would kill both batteries on the new power wagon in ten minutes. But you can run the electricity in your house for a week with the new off roader ev pickups like the ford lightening. And a week of power to my house costs about 100 bucks or 400 a month. 100 bucks a month ain’t no novelty. The new ev off-roader pickups have AI that learns all your habits while your using the vehicle. My ev raises up the suspension on that one part of my drive way where the kids built a mud volcano 3 years ago. And it swerves around that pot hole I used to hit every morning when I still rolled diesel. and these vehicles will learn to lock in your settings and preferences automatically and that ain’t no novelty the vehicle molds itself around you as you own it over its entire life not molded around your body but molded around anything that you set in a cyclical schedule. Give you an example I’ve had my EV for 4 years about a year into ownership my navigation would set for my work automatically every morning, one button pressed and it will drive me to work side streets heavy traffic everything. And it drives like I drive the same tolerances cautionary habits etc…. That ain’t no novelty that’s like your pet dog knowing what it means when you get out of the shower at 4 am on Saturday morning well my dog? She’s 6 and Every Saturday morning automatically she brings me my fishing boots so I’ll hurry up and put my shoes on. She’ll drop em at my feet and just stare right at me as if to say “Don’t you start day dreaming it’s past 4 am The sun will be coming up soon, the fish will be biting, I guess She’s one heck of an off roader ev Saturday fishing Dog.you should get you one!
EV off roaders should be very practical and have great range. It’s not off roading that is the issue, it’s on roading.
Unless you’re doing Baja 1000/Dakar style high speed off roading you’re probably cruising around at fairly slow speeds if you’re cruising, the point being aerodynamics don’t hurt your range much at all. Same goes for regen from all the slowing down and speeding up.
The reason “off road” BEVs have crap range is because they’re built to go highway speeds, fast charge, and pass crash testing all of which add weight and or otherwise compromise the off-roadability of the vehicle. The best off road vehicle is the worst on road vehicle and vice versa. Every vehicle is a compromise, BEVs are no different.
When realistically for a purely off road BEV the best you’re doing is L2 (240V) charging in the US you don’t need a battery that can L3 charge.
For the most part, EV range off-road is not great, but maybe not quite as bad as many people think.Totally depends on the conditions, but light trails are not horrible.
The reality is that in order to make a vehicle great off-road, you have to compromise its on-road capability. It’s true with gas vehicles or EVs, it’s just that gas cars have lots more energy onboard (especially if you carry jerry cans) unless you spend a bunch on huge batteries.
The Chevrolet Silverado EV Trail Boss in Habanero Orange looks very much like a pregnant guppy; all swole up and awkward.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.air-and-space.com%2Fguppies.htm&psig=AOvVaw1Dop_PtJcjlUanvQnYE6O8&ust=1741456242458000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBQQjRxqFwoTCOi9sJ3E-IsDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAb
But that would actually be a good look!
I have a 2025 Chevy Colorado ZR2. I would much rather have that truck (other then the MPG’s) and buy a nice affordable EV like a EV6 or Ionic 5 to daily. or even treat myself to the EV6 GT for a little more and have an EV that uses an EV for what EV’s are good at and have an off roader that is good at what it is good at
1000%!
Right now my fleet has the ZR2 and a 23 GR Supra. I live in the Colorado Front Range so it’s a pretty good combo for just about any instance. I am sure at some point in the future there will be an EV that makes sense to me. And I do plan on keeping the Supra and the Colorado long term. I work from home as well so unless that changes, I don’t need anything that a current generation EV does well, or at least better then my current fleet does better.
9,000lbs! FFS! It needs those 35s just for contact patch. Seriously, can you imagine one of these things on any hill or curve in an ice storm? Whee! Boom!
It’s an interesting point: for low speed off-roading (ie not plowing through dunes!) a much smaller range extender will be able to keep up with average demand compared to what is needed for highway cruising and especially towing. So a more modestly sized off-roader like a jeep, bronco, 4runner, etc. might be one of the best EREV use cases. They would still be compromised for high mile per day road tripping, but they would be ideal for EV daily driver use plus playing off-road on the weekend.
Forget the EV part, the weigh and width of this vehicle are going to make it bad off road.
Doesn’t matter though. Like most factory off road trucks, the people who buy these kind of vehicle do so because it looks cool, not because they actually off road.
Or they live in Texas and have to have something that they can off-road in the mall parking lot.
The main reason serious beefed up offroaders will not likely be EVs is that there still just isn’t enough charging infrastructure in the places they get used like shopping malls and Starbucks.
Please just give me a Suzuki Jimmy Sierra EV with 400 mile range…in the US. The weight reduction would mean it could have like 1/3 the battery.
Or, and bear with me on this, they could just make it smaller. A smaller vehicle will make it a better off-roader in every way, lighter, cheaper, more maneuverable.
But I think niche vehicles like these will increasingly be do-it-all gigantic monsters that alienate people because half of all consumer spending in the US is the top 10% of households. https://apple.news/AnPw0rDI0SOWQNhVKQ3E4dg
The people buying things are thinking about what plane they want to get. Affordability of a niche of roader in this context is absurd. You could slash the price in half and it would still be out of reach for most people, and a lot of new car buyers.
I’m all about small off-roaders.
-Willys and YJ owner
Everything is too big and heavy now. Even the wrangler and Bronco. I miss the Samurai and the other low end off roaders. As has been said on this site many times, the low end of the market is completely gone. Jeep and Ford used to own the low end, no frills side of the market for many things and now have abandoned it.
Actually, a lot of people who can’t afford these will still roll over some negative equity and chain themselves with another huge 84-month payment.
What I really want is an EV-converted 80s style mini truck: A little Mazda slammed and painted purple, a Back-to-the-Future-spec Toyota, or a red S-10 with jump seats in the bed. I’d take that thing to Home Depot like a young god.
That would be cool, especially with the purple paint!
David, I think you have to stop talking about the Scout as if they won’t also be $80-$90,000 trucks.
The concept of the extender reducing battery size/cost/weight makes sense in theory, but as advertised, the ‘Harvester package’ is an additional feature added onto what is already quite a long range truck. They will be very expensive.
No question it’ll be expensive, though it’s worth noting that the Harvester reduces the battery size markedly. I hope Scout prices it below the full-BEV (in theory, they could, as EREVs do promise a cost savings over a full BEV), but they might advertise it as a more capable truck and thus something you should pay for. I hope they don’t!
Ram seemed to imply at a press briefing the other week that its range-extended truck would undercut a BEV in price; that is the way.
Still, the Scout won’t be cheap. That’s for sure.
I agree with all of this. I think people are a bit irrational in the degree they believe that having only one system is inherently more reliable or less expensive than having two working together. If that were true, humanity would have started with fusion-powered laptops and worked their way to using an abacus.
As always, context matters. Adding complexity that provides no benefit is a problem. But adding complexity to can reduce the amount of battery, which is the heaviest and most expensive single element in a BEV, seems to be worth it. Largely because the weight and expense are reduced by adding a technology that has been tested and improved for over 150 years. It also improves the functionality of the product substantially with no real negative impact.
When I was watching the scout debut, I kept asking can the range extender be used exclusively for days on end or is it only a limited time then get to a charger range extender? Could you go trail riding and camping for days and days with some highway in between on just gasoline alone long after the battery is dead and there is no charger?
What BEV would it undercut on price? Maybe the ones with 200+kWh of battery?
I think EREVs are a great option for certain use cases, but the RAM is not a very optimized design (unlike the i3). It’s got a battery almost as big as a Standard Range Lightning and then a normal-sized gas engine from other RAMs.
I bet it will make sense as a replacement for someone who would otherwise need a 200+ kWh BEV for frequent , but it’s going to be heavier, more expensive, and overkill for the many people whose use cases work fine with smaller-battery BEVs. Many RAM buyers that aren’t doing long-distance towing will realize they really don’t need the range extender at all and will go BEV for their next truck, like many i3 REx buyers.
Hopefully someone will build a EREV truck more in the vein of the i3 where the engine and battery are substantially sized down from “regular” BEVs and ICE, rather than just two approximately full-sized drivetrains in one vehicle.
For instance, 50kWh of battery and a 150hp engine, which would likely actually be competitive on price/weight with normal BEVs (that aren’t 9500 lb) and all-ICE vehicles, and provide plenty of capability for all but the most extreme use cases.
I’m glad the RAM EREV exists, but it’s more like two whole, full-sized drivetrains crammed into one vehicle than two smaller drivetrains optimized to work as a “team” like the i3, so I hope more “right-sized” EREV trucks become available in the future that line up better with normal use cases, weights, and prices.
There’s a reason all the successful EVs have been mid-sized to large sedans, and medium sized crossovers. These are the cars where the form-factor and use-case manages to hide or at least make innocuous the added weight and bulk, and lack of transported energy.
It’s easy to say the word “REx” or “EREV,” and most people will picture a machine that solves their problems. The devil is in the details, though. As discussed here at length, how big a REx? A crippled limp-mode motor like an i3 has? Yeah right. Try selling that. A full sized 6-cylinder with the power and duty cycle to do what people want to do with their trucks? That thing has real cost, real weight, real maintenance, and a necessarily complex implementation and likely high cost. A series implementation only makes this worse.
Shrink the battery to compensate? Sure, to a point. Shrinking the battery in an EV necessarily reduces the power out and power in: the battery is at least as analogous to the engine as to the fuel tank, and high charge speeds are achieved naturally by larger batteries. That big truck still needs a big battery.
The thing is, if you make logical choices and reasonable trade-offs on a hybrid vehicle to fit a variety of use cases at a reasonable price, you wind up within 20% of a RAV4 Prime. This is a car that conveys no uniqueness, advertises its prowess at no edge case, and is almost pathologically FINE. Covering weird edge cases like a Silverado off road whatever, or a Hummer whatever, or even my dear departed Taycan requires making big old compromises we aren’t used to making, because historically we cope by just shoving more money into the fuel tank.
Trucks like this are already too big to off-road, and trying to electrify them throws this into sharp relief. Nobody needs this thing.
The i3’s generator size/output wasn’t the primary problem. The problem was removing the driver’s ability to turn it on before the battery was dead.
The right way to use an EREV, when the extended range part is needed, is to turn on the range extender as soon as possible to maintain the battery buffer as long as possible, whether it’s an optimized/minimized design (i3) or a just-put-two-full-size-drivetrains-in-it design (Ram).
Nah. No matter how you cut it, the i3 extender is undersized for anything but occasional/emergency use. Cruising at proper highway speeds it will only supply a fraction of traction demands, and has a gas tank sized for “emergency bailout.” It is quite literally a range extender that extends the range a bit, even switched on up front. People expect more from hybrid drivetrains. Ya know, best of both worlds not worst. Its practicality was much less than its contemporary competitors which is why it failed, in combination with the nosebleed-inducing price. It was a more-bougie Nissan Leaf. I wish they’d kept it in the oven for another year to see if it could be optimized for something, but at the time the “traditional luxury brands” (remember that term?) were terrified of Tesla eating their lunch. They rushed into the EV market unprepared and with braggadocio suggesting Tesla didn’t stand a chance against their clearly superior pedigree. There’s obviously plenty of blame to go around, but I blame their fundamental unseriousness for a chunk of the geopolitical mess we’re in today.
Nah, I owned two i3 REx, did trips as long as 1,500+ miles, used it both with and without the ability to turn the REx on and off, and that was the bigger problem, perhaps in conjunction with the size of the gas tank, than the power output of the range-extender.
At 70mph, with a whole family in the car, it could maintain battery level, in my experience. So, bump up the speed or lower the temps, and you’re still just sipping battery. “A fraction of traction demands” makes it seem like a much different fraction than 1/1 or 9/10.
So in a couple of years, when a production version of a Scout comes out, are we going to get a similar article on how it weighs 8000 lbs in range extender form, and is too big and wide to fit over Elephant Hill and many other places? And how it is also severely compromised due to its size and weight? I’m not sure if the problem is specifically that EVs are compromised offroad, but that giant, oversized vehicles that are in commercial vehicle weight classes are compromised in general regardless of drivetrain.
I’ve been a proponent of reduced Vehicle Demand Energy vehicles (it’s why I drive a BMW i3).
And yes, when I review the Scout, I’ll do my regular vehicle evaluation procedure in which I point out engineering compromises, etc.
I think once you have a scout to drive you need to go to Moab and back with it and write it up as you do.
Oh, I fully agree, I would find something like a flat fender CJ or FJ40 EV or a ZJ range extended EV far more interesting than the new stuff that is coming out. I just think that the reduced demand energy should be applied to all powertrains as well. These 6000-9000 lb monstrosities that are “passenger vehicles” are foolish and compromised, regardless of ICE, hybrid, range extended EV, or EV. The range extender is just a bandaid.
If the first Scout was announced to be similar in size to the old one from decades ago, say 80% the size (and hopefully .8^3, ~1/2 the weight), I’d probably be considering a deposit.
Make that truck with 70 miles of EV range and a range extender and boom, you have a seller at 63k. Instead they will wonder why these don’t sell for 94k.
That’s not far from the Wrangler 4xe. 25 miles pure electric and turbo 4 cylinder ice with 17 gal tank.
A buddy who is a contractor recently traded his loaded Tacoma for a Silverado EV. He loves it because all of his tools that used to take up the Tacoma’s bed fit in the frunk, leaving the bed wide open to fit supplies and materials.
Instead of having to find time to stop and fill his old truck twice a week (!) he plugs it into an 220V 80A service he installed in his garage. No word on how much his electric bill has gone up.
This sounds like a great use case for an EV pickup.
I would be interested in your take on the Deboss garage project to make diesel electric retro fit kits for trucks. They are working with Edison motors (making a diesel electric logging truck) for kits you can buy for conversions. I think they are planning on using the Cummins R2.8 and custom e-axles.
I’d love to see The Autopian cover Edison Motors at all!
David, you seem to be running EVs through a very strict and thorough “rationality test” that I don’t see you use with other vehicles. We get it, you think EVs are not a good idea, and that REEV are the future. You are passionate about it and it clearly gets your writing juices flowing. And you are probably right! But EVs need a little bit of that pro-car love too!
The Silverado Trail Boss is a halo car, most of them will never touch a blade of grass with their wheels, just like most Porsche owners don’t drive them particularly sportily, and G-Wagen drivers won’t go anywhere near mud. People who buy the Silverado Trail Boss will know exactly what they are getting into, it will be the coolest grocery hauler on their street, three year later it will be an absolute bargain as a CPO when they return it to lease something else in its place (perhaps a REEV even), and that’s fine, having options is great!
“You think EVs are not a good idea” is just not true. I’m a huge fan of EVs (Here’s my Rivian R1T and Ford F-150 Lightning review) but I’m not going to blindly defend them for all market segments/use cases.
It’s worth pointing out compromises of all vehicles, gas, electric or hybrid.
My bad for mischaracterizing your positions.
That’s why we put a deposit down on a Scout SUV with the Harvester range extender. It’s the only way an EV works for us, especially if we want to do some light off-roading with it. If this vehicle doesn’t materialize, we will be going with a Lexus GX550 if they work the kinks out with the engine issues and the hood rattling around at speed. Alternatively, if my wife’s 264,000 mile 99 Durango finally breaks in some extremely expensive way soon, we probably will go for a Mazda CX-90 and save some coin.