All Hail the Rise of the Electric Truck

After years of Sparks and Leafs, a new class of hard-tested, rough-riding, tough-as-all-hell e-trucks is here to turbocharge your life-and maybe even save the planet-with sheer power.

- By Aaron Foley

WHEN AUTOMAKERS WANT to test what the public thinks of an upcoming truck model, they head to Texas. So that's where Darren Palmer, vice president of electric-vehicle programs at Ford, found himself four years ago. The handful of people in Palmer's Dallas test group initially thought they were watching a demonstration of Ford's F-150 Raptor, an absolute beast of a gas-powered performance truck. Palmer didn't exactly tell them otherwise as he ran through the numbers.

I said, 'I've got this new truck for you. It's got 775 pounds of torque, it has 563 horsepower, it'll pull a 10,000-pound trailer at a 25 percent grade, and it goes zero to 60 in four seconds, he says. Then he revealed that the Lightning was all electric. It was hilarious watching [these] Texans with their faces, mouths open. Ford's F-150 Lightning is now available to order at just under $40,000.

Ford has a planned production run of 150,000 trucks for 2023, and it isn't alone in manufacturing electric versions of gas-guzzlers. There's an all-electric Chevy Silverado on the way in 2023. There's the Hummer EV pickup, available for preorder now for a cool $80,000. And then there's the burly yet sleek R1T truck from Rivian, a newer American manufacturer that officially entered the market last year. Add to all these Tesla's much publicized Cybertruck, tentatively scheduled for a 2023 release, and you have a fleet of powerful e-trucks ready to take to America's busy superhighways and dust-strewn back roads.