sly_karma
Crew Member
I don't see 3/4 or 1 ton EV equivalents coming out until the next generation of battery chemistry and ultra fast charging is sorted. The heavy duty series trucks are expected to tow or haul long distances, and the existing tech doesn't have the range even at heavy half format, ie, Lightning. In theory you could double the battery capacity, but where do you put it? Heavy duty trucks have a footprint that's only a little bigger than that of a half ton, not really enough area. Make it thicker? If you go down, you're sacrificing ground clearance. Go up, and you're heading toward rollover-prone.
Chevy are set to release their EV truck this coming summer and are claiming available range of 640 km, which would mean about 200 kWh of capacity. Sounds good, but the existing DCFC network mostly has charge speeds of 150 kW, so the benchmark 15-80% highway charge-and-go is gonna take at least 52 minutes - assuming nominal speed is sustained for the whole time. Will get better once access to Tesla V4 chargers becomes widespread, as they can hit 250 kW, bringing that time down to 31 minutes. Still, that's a lot of battery to pack around; it reduces bed payload, and the Silverado EV caps out at 10,000 lb tow capacity; ie, still a half ton, albeit with better range.
Lots of development work is being done on batteries with more capacity in the same space and weight. Energy density, expressed in Wh/kg is the key metric in labs around the world. My feeling is heavy duty pickups become viable when today's automotive energy density standards, about 300 Wh/kg, double to 600 or so - at the practical, production-ready level. There have been several proof of concept projects that have achieved values as high as 700 Wh/kg, so those now move to developmental work and cost engineering to see if they can be scaled for mass deployment at affordable price. And as years pass, you hope that distribution, speed and reliability of the public charging system improves to be able to exploit the coming gen 2 battery standard.
