- KG Mobility's Musso EV pickup will be Korea's first EV truck, beating Hyundai and Kia to market in their home country.
- The Musso EV features unibody construction and shares its underpinnings with the KGM Torres EVX.
- Its crossover cousin has a 73.4 kWh battery, bestowing it with up to 287 miles of WLTP range.
There has been a lot of talk about electric pickup trucks from Hyundai or Kia, and both are expected to produce such vehicles. However, they won’t debut this year, which means the KGM Musso EV will beat them to market as it’s expected to make its official debut in South Korea sometime in the first quarter of the year.
If KGM (the shortened form of KG Mobility) doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because it’s a carmaker that recently rebranded itself after filing for bankruptcy in 2020 and finding a new owner. The company was formerly known as SsangYong, a South Korean manufacturer of crossovers and SUVs, tracing its roots back to 1954 with many popular high-riding models under its belt.
One of tts most famous models is the Musso, which is being turned into an EV-only sub-brand within KG Mobility. Its first product is the KGM Musso EV, a pure electric pickup previewed by a close-to-production concept in 2023 (pictured). The series model stays very close to the concept in terms of design—it’s almost identical to the study.
Gallery: KGM O100 Concept
Under its rather handsome pickup body lies the same platform that underpins the Actyon, a BMW X3-sized SUV, as well as the smaller Torres. The latter has a fully electric variant called the Torres EVX, which has a single 190-horsepower motor driving the front wheels and a 73.4-kilowatt-hour battery, giving it a WLTP range of 287 miles (462 kilometers).
We don’t know if this same battery pack (made from cells supplied by BYD) will power the Musso EV pickup—its stretched wheelbase could accommodate a larger pack. The concept had “Torres” embossed into its tailgate, hinting it was a pickup version of the two-box crossover. KG Mobility confirmed that the truck will feature all-wheel drive, which means it will have a dual-motor powertrain. So it should pack more oomph than its crossover sibling.
According to Drive.com.au, KG Mobility plans to sell the Musso EV pickup outside South Korea. Australia and the UK will get right-hand-drive versions of the model, but it’s unclear if it will reach other markets, such as Europe. Given the pickup’s crossover-derived underpinnings and unibody construction, this Ford Ranger-sized EV will not be a heavy-duty offering. It's more of a lifestyle truck, like a Hyundai Santa Cruz.
Since KG Mobility hasn't released any photos of the production model that we can use, we've embedded a video walkaround from the unveiling posted by a channel called VehicleLuv. The video is in Korean, however, so you'll need to turn on the translated captions if you want to know what they're saying. Still, it's our best look yet.
Kia has also confirmed it is working on an electric version of the Tasman pickup, but we don’t know when it will arrive or which markets it will reach. The combustion-powered Tasman will debut in the first half of the year in Korea, but it will also be sold in Australia, the Middle East and likely other markets that have yet to be announced. But it's definitely not coming to the U.S.
Last year, there were a couple of sightings of what looked a lot like a Kia EV9 with a crew cab and a bed in the back. It was either a mule that used part of an EV9’s body for testing purposes, or Kia really is going to launch an EV9 pickup. Back in 2022, the automaker announced its plan to introduce 14 new EVs by 2027, two of which are pickups—this could be the second model after the Tasman EV. It could also be a model more suited to North America.
Hyundai is also known to have at least one electric pickup project in the works, but it won’t simply be its version of what Kia is working on. Recent reports suggest that it could use a platform supplied by General Motors as the base for its EV truck. According to the Korean Car Blog, the EV9-based prototype spotted last year is, in fact, a mule used by Hyundai, not Kia, to test its upcoming electric truck (which could be a range extender), since it also featured parts from a Hyundai Santa Cruz.
