Chevy’s electric Silverado will debut at CES in January, though don’t expect to be able to buy one any time next year. GM has now confirmed that it won’t be built until early 2023.
That is better late than never I guess, for a truck that will directly compete with the Ford F-150 Lightning, the theoretical Tesla Cybertruck, and the Rivian R1T, all trucks that will probably be on the market before the electric Silverado.
Automotive News has the story:
General Motors plans to build the Chevrolet Silverado EV starting in early 2023, a top executive said Thursday.
Doug Parks, executive vice president for global product development, purchasing and supply chain, provided production timing at Deutsche Bank’s AutoTech Conference.
[...]
GM North America President Steve Carlisle told Automotive News in September that the electric pickup won’t necessarily be a derivative of today’s gasoline-powered pickup.
The flexibility of the Ultium battery platform removes the architectural limits that internal combustion vehicles have, Carlisle said at the time.
We don’t know many actual details as to what the electric Silverado is going to be, other than that it will be a truck, and that it will apparently have a big glass roof, and it will likely have around 400 miles of range, if not more, though we’ll probably get a lot of that information in January. Auto News also makes sort of a big deal about the fact that it will get here after the F-150 Lightning.
But, the EV market right now is still just a single-digit percentage of the light-duty car market in America, meaning that there is a lot of room for growth and once EV manufacturing is really scaled up it will make Tesla’s current operation look miniscule by comparison. GM seems content to play the long game, in other words, which is the opposite of Tesla and to a lesser degree Rivian, while Ford seems content to occupy a middle ground. By mid-decade, we’ll have a good idea which of these heavyweights will prevail, but it’s very likely that the answer will be “all of them.”