General Motors charged out of left field this week to announce a new world record, and it's a properly astonishing feat. An engineering team within the Detroit automotive giant managed to push the single-charge EV range record into triple digits, beating out the ever-slippery Lucid Air GT sedan by over 300 miles (483 km) with the Silverado EV. A pickup truck.
As announced last October, the 2025 Silverado EV Max Range Work Truck (8WT) boasts an EPA-estimated range of 492 miles (792 km), shooting right past the Teslas and Rivians of the world to park comfortably behind the 516-mile (830-km) Lucid Air Grand S Touring at the tippity top of the US market range leader list. Its 68-mpg-e efficiency is far less impressive, but you can't call it a slouch when it comes to long-hauling on a single charge.
Well before Lucid's sedan had set its recent 749-mile (1,205-km) mark, itself a full 100 miles (161 km) farther than the previous record, some GM engineers began theorizing about how far the Silverado Max Range WT commercial pickup might actually go with a little bit of forethought and precise execution. Some voices among the group were particularly ambitious: 1,000 miles (1,609 km) didn't seem out of reach.
A proper challenge was formulated, and the team began driving a production Silverado MR WT to fine-tune their hypermiling strategies.
"Getting this kind of range on a full charge doesn’t happen by accident," explained Kurt Kelty, GM VP of battery, propulsion and sustainability. "It takes deep integration across battery chemistry, drive unit efficiency, software and vehicle engineering."
Each engineer brought in his or her own expertise when developing driving strategies, and the team quickly dialed in a holistic game plan. Some of the strategies were fairly obvious mileage-boosting techniques and/or luxuries available to an engineering team that might not be available to an everyday driver. For instance, the driver was mostly alone to cut out the additional weight of passengers, and the truck's spare tire was left behind to further slash weight.
Heavily modifying the vehicle would have gone completely against the spirit of the challenge, but the team did make some slight alterations that stayed within the letter of the user manual. They inflated all tires to the highest recommended pressure to cut rolling resistance, fine-tuned the wheel alignment for optimal performance, and set the windshield wipers as low as possible to minimize drag. They also added a tonneau cover over the bed for smoother airflow.
The timing of the feat was no coincidence, either, as the Michigan summer afforded the best possible ambient conditions for battery performance. It didn't, however, provide the best possible ambient conditions for driving around with no A/C whatsoever – GM's team took one for science and left the climate control off for the duration of the driving mission.
The final strategy might make the challenge especially difficult – or at least highly tedious – to repeat for regular Silverado EV owners. Whenever safe to do so, each driver maintained a speed in the 20- to 25-mph (32- to 40-km/h) range, which was determined to be the most efficient possible cruising range. At such low speeds, they found, virtually all of the truck's battery power was directed into propulsion, with minimal energy getting sucked up by other systems and functions.
GM calls that 20- to 25-mph sweet spot "a realistic pace for neighborhood or city driving in southeast Michigan," which is fair enough, but it's a tough pace to maintain when actually aspiring to travel a full 1,000 miles – or 492 miles, for that matter. Drivers could always circle their residential neighborhood hundreds of times, try to get stuck in slow-moving city traffic for days on end, or otherwise drive 1,000 miles without really going anywhere, but we think the "safe to do so" caveat would prevent holding that speed on long A-to-B trips, particularly if the definition of safety extends to not creating a massive tail of angry drivers behind you.
The purpose here, though, was entirely on pushing the Silverado EV, and its hulking 205-kWh battery, to its absolute limit so recreating any type of realistic driving scenario was not a prerequisite. Drivers took one-hour shifts to fit the challenge into their regular workdays, driving the truck around a pre-mapped section of public roads near GM’s Milford Proving Ground, ultimately wrapping up in Detroit's Belle Isle – essentially 1,000 miles worth of driving inside 50 miles of point-to-point distance.
We actually just rounded to a clean, even 1,000 miles, but to get precise, the team pushed the Silverado EV all the way to 1,059.2 miles on a single charge, a full 310 (500 km) beyond Lucid's Guinness World Record mileage from last month. Lucid need not worry, though, as its record still sits comfortably in the Guinness book. GM makes no mention of Guinness or any third-party verification and really treated the feat as an internal engineering and R&D challenge.
In place of an official world record certificate, GM 3D-printed its crew a small trophy to acknowledge its impressive accomplishment, powering the printer in question via the battery of the very same Silverado EV that completed the journey ... after a recharge, of course.
Source: General Motors
