It’s the moment we’ve long been waiting for. No, not the debut of another all-electric truck that has the bones to be a great adventure vehicle. Sure the Chevy Silverado EV has all sorts of ooh and ahh specs like 600+ horsepower, 700+ pound-feet of torque, 4-wheel turning, and 400 miles of range—standard.
Cool, cool.
But it’s the BED that is the real news here. Anyone who like to camp and/or haul lots of outdoor goods around in a truck has thoughts about bed length in modern trucks, and that thought is usually: These stupid beds are way too short. Well, Chevy is giving the people what they want. The people with opinions about truck beds that is.
The 5’11” bed does two really cool tricks. First, is the tailgate that effectively lengthens the bed, something GM has had for a few years now, called the MultiPro. Drop the tailgate down, then pull up a little vertical wall they call the load stop, and now you get a couple extra feet to load kayaks, surfboards, 27 YETI coolers, what have you.
But the genius part is the “midgate.” You can lower the wall between the cab and the bed, sorta like folding down the seats in a SUV or crossover. Or, exactly like that, really. Now you have 10’10” of bed. 10 feet! Even cooler, you can keep one of the seats up in the back in the 60/40 configuration.
The Chevy Avalanche did the same thing (which partially explains why the EV Silverado looks like an Avalanche from the future), but with a much smaller 8-foot bed when wide open, because it did not have the load stop tailgate.
The magic midgate.
Yeah, this truck can tow 10,000 pounds, go 0-60 in less than 5 seconds, and has a payload of 1,300 pounds. That’s all great, but also pointless if the truck has a toy bed that’s like five feet long. I’m already dreaming about sleeping in the back of a truck with four extra feet of floor space beyond my head.
These are far behind the Rivian and Ford Lightning when it comes to production schedule, with the first trucks being delivered early 2023. If you like, you can reserve one starting today. Oh, prices? Well, they’re kinda all over the place. The highest-end trim will set you back a cool $105,000. But Chevy is selling the stripped-down work truck version (though still with the 400-mile range and the trick bed) for $39,000. Expect trims levels along that $70k gap. Chevy says an off-road focused “Trail Boss” version is coming sometime in 2024.
I’m just spitballing here, but you could store four or five big rugged totes of outdoor gear in the bed of the truck when driving, the bed all buttoned up, then at camp, just shove the totes to the tailgate, lower the midgate, and bang—there’s your bed platform. You could lay out a full bed setup at the head of the bed, then have your cooking setup on the tailgate, with feet in between to spare, without futzing around with the logistics of moving everything around between sleeping and eating. Your dog can have their own bed. Your kids, even. The mind boggles.
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