Reservations for the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV, GM’s mainstream electric full-size pickup truck, have grown to 140,000, including 400 fleet operators, and General Motors continues to add names to the list, CEO Mary Barra told investors during a call to report the company’s first-quarter earnings.
Barra says 60 percent of reservations are customers new to GM and 70 percent of demand is coming from the coasts.
Pre-production of the electric truck will begin at Detroit’s Factory Zero in a few weeks with salable units rolling off the line in 11 months, followed by additional production at the Orion Assembly plant in 2024. That will be 11 months after Ford began building F-150 Lightnings for customers (which kicked off this week), the Silverado EV’s direct competitor, but Barra is convinced the truck will be worth the wait, offering superior range, faster fast-charging, four-wheel steering, SuperCruise, a larger more flexible pickup cab and bed, and a differentiated customer experience.
In welcome news to anyone who has attempted to purchase a car in recent months—particularly a hotly anticipated new model—more than 95 percent of Chevy dealers are signing on to be EV centers and are committed to sticking to MSRP, knowing price gouging will affect future product allocation, she says.
GMC has taken 70,000 reservations for the 2022 Hummer EV, another full-size electric pickup that shares components with the Silverado, as well as the 2025 GMC Hummer SUV, Barra said.
The building demand comes as Ford needed to close its F-150 Lightning’s order books in December when reservations reached about 200,000. Ford makes the Lightning at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn which was initially set up to make 80,000 Lightnings a year and has since been expanded twice to increase capacity to 150,000 a year, a run rate that will take effect later this year. Even still, some customers could wait as long as a year for their Lightnings. Ford is also building a new electric vehicle assembly plant for F-Series trucks in Stanton, Tennessee, but it won’t be ready until 2025.
GM’s trucks are among six volume EVs being launched in the coming years. Next up is the 2023 Cadillac Lyriq midsize SUV that is being built in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Cadillac will start taking orders May 19.
Still to come is the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV that will be shown in July and go into production in mid-2023. Chevy will reveal the 2023 Equinox EV in the fall with production to commence shortly after the Blazer. Barra says the Equinox compact SUV (pictured above) will keep its $30,000 starting price despite higher material costs and inflation.
Excitement has also been building since GM confirmed it will electrify the Corvette, starting next year with a hybrid, and sometime after that, a full battery-electric version.
GM also expects to make 50,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs and EUVs this year—40,000 of them for the U.S.—after production was ceased most of 2021 due to a battery recall.
Four plants will have been modified to make EVs and three new battery plants will be in place between this summer and 2024, with the location of a fourth factory to be announced soon,.
Barra says GM will have the capacity to build 1 million EVs in North America as well as in China by the end of 2025 and will assemble 400,000 electric vehicles this year and in 2023. Helping the situation is an improving availability of semiconductor chips, which should make it possible to boost production as much as 30 percent this year.
The product updates come as GM reported net income of $2.9 billion for the first quarter of 2022, a 2.7 percent decrease from a year ago, on $36 billion in revenue for global earnings of $4 billion before interest and taxes. The results were similar to year ago despite higher material costs. New vehicles continue to fly off the lots, averaging a 15-day supply.
Keyword: 2024 Chevy Silverado EV Reservations Pile Up as GM Preps Wider EV Offensive