The race to get the most range out of your electric vehicle’s battery isn’t exactly anything new. It’s pretty much been happening since EVs first hit the scene, but Chevy just blew everyone else’s doors off with the feat it just achieved in a 2026 Silverado EV Work Truck: 1,059.2 miles on a single charge. I know that sounds nearly impossible, because it sort of is. At least, it is for normal people like you and me.
Despite the fact the EPA rates the Silverado EV WT at 493 miles, Chevy was able to more than double it using some tricks no regular person would ever do. Engineers took hypermiling to the extreme with this experiment, They lowered the truck’s windshield wiper arms, inflated its tires as high as was safe, got rid of the spare tire, changed the wheel allignment, added a tonneau cover, turned off the climate control and made sure that — for the most part — there was only ever one person in the truck. Of course, the biggest thing Chevy did to gain a range advantage was driving the truck quite slowly. The team averaged somewhere between 20 and 25 mph for the entire test, which meant it took seven days to complete. Obviously, no one except for the weirdest engineers and biggest hypermiling nerds will ever come close to doing most of these things, but it clearly paid off with the truck averaging a massive 4.9 miles per kWh.
It’s not really possible to break it down, but I’d wager that driving at those low speeds made a far bigger difference than all of the other changes combined — especially the weight savings measures. The Silverado EV WT weighs right around 8,500 pounds all by itself, so I doubt that removing the spare tire or making engineers drive solo made that much of a difference.
What did we learn?
Well, there’s a lot that goes into hypermiling… clearly.
A group of 40 engineers says they took turns driving in one-hour shifts on public roads to push the 205-kWh battery of the Silverado to its limits. Their efforts were enough to unofficially beat the Guinness World Record Lucid set in July with an Air Grand Touring that traveled 749 miles across Europe.
“Getting this kind of range on a full charge doesn’t happen by accident. It takes deep integration across battery chemistry, drive unit efficiency, software and vehicle engineering—and that’s exactly what the team delivered, Kurt Kelty, VP of battery, propulsion and sustainability, said in a statement. “This achievement is a great example of how far our EV technology has come, and the kind of innovation we’re building on every day at GM.”
I know that none of this is super pertinent to real-world driving, but more often than not, the automotive world revolves around who can get the biggest number. In this case, it sure looks like that “biggest number” belongs to General Motors and the Chevy Silverado EV.
