For many owners, how far an electric truck can drive on a single charge will determine whether it's an acceptable replacement for a conventionally fueled pickup truck. When engineering the first electric Silverado, Chevrolet set out to reduce the concern about driving range as much as possible and equipped the vehicle with a huge 200+ kWh battery pack, the largest available on any EV today.
I fully charged a 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV RST First Edition and headed out on the highway to drive a constant 70 miles per hour to see how far the vehicle would go before the huge battery was exhausted.
Chevrolet got a lot of things right with the 2024 Silverado EV. The mid-gate feature is aa extremely tool, especially for contractors. With the mid-gate open, the Silverado EV has 10' 10" of cargo length without hanging over the end of the open tailgate.
Even without the mid-gate open, the 5'11"' bed is half a foot longer than the bed in the Ford F-150 Lightning and the front trunk, or frunk, offers up to 10.7 cubic feet of secure cargo space.
With the Silverado's PowerBase feature, users can power a variety of items and use up to 10.2 kW of available power from the Silverado's battery. And for those that purchase GM Energy's Vehicle to Home (V2H) system, the truck can power their home or business during a power disruption for days at a time.
Chevrolet expects the Silverado EV RST to have a combined EPA range rating of 440 miles, but the EPA hasn't certified the figure yet. In my numerous 70 mph highway range tests over the years, I've found that most vehicles fall short of their combined EPA range rating when driven at 70 mph.
However, it's not that unusual for a vehicle to meet or even exceed that figure.
The Porsche Taycan, for instance, always exceeds its EPA range figure by a wide margin whenever we do highway range tests. Tesla vehicles, on the other hand, usually fall about 10% short of their EPA combined range ratings
So after charging the Silverado EV up to 100% at an Electrify America DC fast charger, I headed out onto the New Jersey Turnpike to drive the same course that I use for all of my range tests to see how far the huge battery pack would propel the electric pickup truck
After over six hours of driving and using GM's hand's-free Super Cruise for most of the day, I rolled back into the same Electrify America parking lot where I charged up that morning and finished up driving 441.7 miles, slightly more than Chevrolet's quoted 440-mile combined range rating.
Of course, if I was pulling a 10,000-lb trailer, or if this range test was done in the dead of winter, the results would have been much different, and my day would have been much shorter. But now we have a best-case benchmark to start with.
About Our Range Tests
We want to make it clear our range tests aren't perfect. There are variables simply out of our control like wind, traffic, and weather. However, we do our best to control what we can.
We always set the tires to the manufacturer's recommended pressure, crosscheck the speedometer with a GPS for accuracy, and place the vehicle in the most efficient driving mode. In the case of the Silverado EV, that's the "normal" driving mode. We set the climate control to somewhere between 68°F and 70°F and on the lowest fan setting unless more heating or cooling is needed to maintain a comfortable cabin.
We always charge the vehicle up to 100 percent right before starting the test, reset the trip meter, and enter the highway immediately or within a couple of miles. We then drive at a constant 70 mph and in long loops, so we end up either where we started or as close as possible.
Driving conditions, temperature, and topography will affect an EVs driving range and our 70-mph range tests serve only as a guideline of approximately what you should expect if you drive the same EV under similar conditions.