It’s tough out there for an electric truck.
Rivian’s R1T was the showpiece that launched the company; I was blown away the moment I saw its concept version at a car show in the 2010s. But the truck’s sales are down 38% over last year as the R1S SUV becomes the brand’s signature vehicle. Ford has found some footing with the F-150 Lightning, but is lowering expectations for the vehicle as Detroit faces fierce headwinds trying to convince its legion of truck drivers to go electric — and backtracks toward plug-in hybrids. The category leader in sales, the Tesla Cybertruck, exists primarily to inspire TikTok derision, which would be easier to swallow if its sales, while rising, didn’t pale in comparison to the Model Y and 3.
There are practical reasons for sluggish truck sales — the SUV shape is more useful than a pickup truck for the kinds of people currently buying EVs. There are political reasons, of course. Even with Donald Trump’s softening his EV hatred thanks to support from Elon Musk, lots of pickup drivers remain electric-averse. There are financial reasons, since many of the electric truck offerings to date are staggeringly expensive. Above these concerns floats a broader, more all-consuming problem: Maybe it’s just not the right time to make an all-electric truck, at least not the monstrous kind America buys.
Lucid’s CEO recently remarked on this idea in response to drawings of a theoretical Lucid pickup circulating on the internet. Despite America’s insatiable appetite for pickups, the company is absolutely not making a truck right now, he said.
His rationale boils down to the conundrum for today’s EVs: Vehicles of all stripes have been getting bigger as American drivers choose crossovers, SUVs, and trucks. Since those are the shapes Americans want, and want to pay extra for, those are the kinds of EVs carmakers want to sell. But a larger EV is a less efficient one. It takes lots of energy to move a heavy vehicle, which means they need huge batteries just to achieve a normal driving range.
As I noted earlier this month, Lucid has been counterculturally hyper-focused on making efficient vehicles that can maximize range. Its Air sedans achieve an industry-leading 4 miles per kilowatt-hour of electricity, which lets the cars claim more than 400 miles per charge despite having a battery of average size. The excellent but heavyweight R1T is only about half as efficient. You can buy one with 420 miles of range, but doing so requires an enormous and expensive battery pack.
Weight alone is not the only issue. Pickup owners — even those who never stray from the smooth pavement of the suburbs — want their vehicles to be able to tow a boat or tackle the Rubicon trail. Towing with an EV dings the driving range that’s already low because of the vehicle’s heft. Knowing that, Lucid CTO and CEO Peter Rawlinson estimated the minimum battery size threshold for a workable electric pickup at 150 kilowatt-hours — nearly double the size of the 84-kilowatt hour battery that powers the simplest Lucid Air, and well past the 118-kilowatt hour pack in the long range Grand Touring edition. Given the cost of today’s batteries and their physical limitations, it’s simply difficult to make the math work for the kind of megavehicle that full-size pickups have become.
Downsizing the truck would help, of course. It’d be much easier, and cheaper, to fully electrify something the size and weight of the Chevy S-10. However, the chorus of car enthusiasts and compact truck fans calling for the pickup to return to its reasonably sized roots has been drowned out by all the money Detroit is making on monster trucks. Don’t pin your hopes there.
But just because the full-size EV pickup is in a tough spot now doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. The battery calculus will change as technologies improve and economies of scale emerge. At some point, it might be possible to squeeze 150 or 200 kilowatt-hours of juice into a not-gargantuan battery pack, and to build it for less than a small fortune, at which point the fully electric F-150 or Silverado becomes a far more attractive proposition.
The more immediate solution, though, is the ongoing rise of the hybrid. Trucks make terrific hybrids. The hybrid version of the current Ford F-150 has plenty of power and driving range for serious work or play, and also gets 25 miles per gallon in the city compared to 18-20 mpg for combustion-only trucks. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, remember that when it comes to cutting fossil fuels consumption and emissions, improving gas-guzzlers by a little can be more powerful than improving already-efficient cars by a lot. (With mpg, it’s better to go from bad to decent than from good to great. It’s a bad statistic.)
Crucially for the potential to cut the carbon emissions of America’s truck fleet, conventional hybrids are less weighed down by a feeling of foreignness and political baggage. There was a time when vehicles like the Prius were the peak of conspicuous car consumption for lefty greens. Now a slew of vehicles, including trucks, come in hybrid configurations (and some cars, like the Toyota Camry, have ditched combustion-only models altogether). A hybrid is just a car, one you can pump gas into and drive without thinking too much about the partisan implications of its powertrain.
The idea of plug-in hybrid full-size trucks is alluring, too. Owners could live out the fantasy of driving a weekend warrior 4x4 — and enjoy the in-group signaling that comes with pickup ownership — all while using electricity for the local driving that makes up most of their actual transportation needs. Perhaps someday we could even get Heatmap’s dream vehicle, a plug-in hybrid version of the reasonably sized Ford Maverick.
Trucks are good candidates for unusual hybrid configurations, too. This week, some American reviewers tested, and loved, the BYD Shark, a Chinese-made pickup on sale in Mexico but not here. The Shark’s hybrid setup is a range extender, meaning that although the gas engine can drive the front wheels in some situations, it exists primarily to charge a generator that powers electric motors, and those motors push the vehicle. Its battery pack can hold enough energy for an estimated 60 miles of electric driving.
The Shark won’t swim to America, given the ongoing tariffs battle. But it doesn’t have to. For 2025, Ram has promised us the Ramcharger extended-range pickup that puts this tech into a truck Americans can buy. Heatmap’s Jesse Jenkins called it an “ideal near-term product to satisfy some of the trickiest American market segments to electrify: namely the uniquely American demand for full-size pickups and massive SUVs.”
Indeed, if truck shoppers give this new kind of electrified vehicle a chance, they’re going to like what they find.
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
