It seems like just about every other week, a new electric vehicle (EV) is being introduced with bigger, better features than before. Well, this time, it's Chevy's Silverado EV with an impressive 450-plus-mile range.
Batteries are the name of the game in the EV industry, and Chevy's Silverado EV is poised to lead the pack. The Silverado EV boasts some impressive features, including the 450-mile range, 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds, and 10,000-pound towing capability.
But the real selling point is the 200-plus kWh battery.
Instead of measuring an EV's capacity in gallons, they're measured in how many watts the battery can store. And because EVs can store so many, they're consolidated into kilowatts (kW), or a thousand watts.
To measure the consumption of kilowatts by an EV battery, the measurement used is kilowatt-hours (kWh), which is the amount of energy consumed by running a single 1,000-watt appliance for one hour.
If you're driving an EV, you'll probably see your display showing you the range of the vehicle in terms of miles of travel per kWh of power consumed. For most EVs, that's about 2.9 miles per kWh.
So now, onto the 200 kWh Silverado battery. To put this battery in perspective, the average EV right now is running on a 75 kWh battery, and a standard EV truck is running on a 100 kWh battery. A similar truck on the EV market, Ford's F-150 Lighting long-range battery, comes in at 131 kWh.
Despite the massive size of this battery, the range is also incredibly impressive. While Chevy's website advertises a conservative 400-mile range, a team at Electrek got to test out the truck and said that they easily got over 450 — even close to 500 — miles in a single charge when driving the vehicle in a normal town setting.
This type of range could be a game-changer for the EV truck market. For comparison, the GMC Hummer EV has a similar-sized battery but only has a 329-mile range.
The Silverado EV is expected to come out next year, with the longest-range battery and all options coming in at an estimated $105,000 and up. More Silverado EVs are expected to follow with varying price tags.
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