9,000 Miles Of Proof: Electric Trucks Can Tow, But Battery Size Is Everything

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A couple of years ago, I wrote an article titled “We May Have Been Wrong To Mock GM’s Big Battery Approach To Electric Trucks.” Back then, it was incredibly easy to point and laugh at vehicles like the Hummer EV for carrying around absurdly massive battery packs just to go to the grocery store. But as I started to look at the realities of towing with an electric vehicle, it became clear that dragging a huge battery around was going to be the only way to make the physics work.

Now, I have 9,000 miles of proof that I was right, and proof that electric RVing is actually a good experience.

This wasn’t a bunch of local trips, nor was it a trip along carefully-chosen highways with better than average infrastructure. We hauled a travel trailer from New Mexico to California, back up through the mountains of Arizona, along the rest of Route 66 to Chicago, out to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and all the way back home via the South. We traveled through 21 states. We visited 7 national parks and several national monuments, seashores, and lakeshores. We visited dozens of charging stations from every major charging provider. We saw the lights of several top US cities along with dark skies where we saw the Milky Way over deserts and oceans.

What I learned on this trip is that electric trucks can absolutely tow heavy loads over massive distances today. The mechanical capability is flawless. But the trip also proved that the current industry trend of trying to sell electric pickups with 100 to 130 kWh battery packs is a complete dead end. 

If you want an electric truck to do real work on the highway, battery size is everything.

(Note: If you want the actual travelogue, campground reviews, and the story of the road itself, I am detailing the entire trip over at Charge To The Parks starting with The Road Caught Up With Us (But We Made It). This article is strictly about the hardware, the numbers, and the infrastructure we encountered along the way.)

The Upside: The Silverado EV Is A Towing Beast

Before we get into the charging and range, we have to talk about how this truck handles weight. Mechanically speaking, electric towing is vastly superior to gas and diesel. You get instant torque, zero struggling with gearing and RPMs on inclines, perfect control of speed going down mountains, and effortless merging with traffic on even short onramps. Almost everything that sucks about towing is solved.

As my son put it, “I’m glad we have a truck now that you just drive with the camper like normal.” Importantly, he had a good baseline for comparison. Last year, he went with us on a 4,000-mile trip pulling one of the same trailers with a Chevy Suburban.

Midway through our trip, we upgraded to a newer travel trailer, choosing a 7,000-pound (loaded) inTech OVR Navigate. The Silverado definitely noticed the upgrade. The rear end sagged a bit more, and the handling on twisty mountain roads lost a tiny amount of its sharpness because we were riding right on the edge of what requires a weight distribution hitch (per the manual, which is often ignored by owners).

Despite skipping the WDH, the truck still felt anchored to the road. We drove through some extreme wind conditions (there were tornado warnings in the area) that would have forced a lighter tow vehicle to stop until the storm passed. The Silverado EV just absorbed it. The truck only shook a little, and kept the trailer completely in line. Having a tow vehicle that literally weighs a ton more than the camper tends to keep everything planted.

Inside the cab, the experience was just as solid. The seating, the HVAC, and the overall amenities are excellent. We were able to ride comfortably all day. We routinely knocked out long 400-mile runs without feeling physically broken by the time we finally parked for the night. All of this comfort came with the mid-range LT package (above the Work Truck, but below the RST).

When you put the truck in Park and set up camp for the night, the Silverado EV starts to do things that even the best diesel pickups simply can’t do. Beyond just pulling the heavy rig, having a 170 kWh battery sitting right in front of the hitch means you effectively have a massive, silent power station anywhere the camper is. 

The Silverado EV’s onboard PowerBase system pushes out up to 10.2 kW of offboard power. Knowing I could just plug the camper straight into the truck’s 240V or 120V outlets to run the air conditioning, microwave, and lights completely eliminated any boondocking anxiety. We could stop anywhere and have all of the comfort of an RV park.

Not only was this great for camping in parking lots, truck stops, and rest areas, but for camping in the Outer Banks. We never went without air conditioning, even on hot days that would have made that part of the trip miserable, and we did it all without paying for a full hookup campsite until our very last day on the islands.

The Downside: The Math of Pulling a Brick Through Air

Here is where we have to give the EV skeptics some credit. They are absolutely right about the massive range penalty of towing. When you hitch a heavy brick to the back of your truck, aerodynamics take a brutal toll.

Our first trailer got about 1.0 miles/kWh towing at 65 mph (our ABRP reference figure). When we swapped to the 7,000-pound inTech, our efficiency dropped down to 0.9 miles/kWh. If you are doing the math at home, 0.9 miles/kWh means a 130 kWh battery pack (the standard “extended range” packs you find in trucks like the F-150 Lightning or Rivian R1T) will give you about 117 miles of total range from 100% to completely dead. A Tesla Cybertruck’s 123 kWh battery does a few miles less.

But out in the real world, you never drive from 100% to 0%. 

First, you need a safety buffer. I learned that the hard way in Oklahoma. We hit some tornado-producing storms with massive headwinds that absolutely shredded our range. I rolled into a charging station in Oklahoma City with the truck screaming at me in reduced power mode at 4% after 45 minutes of stressful hypermiling. After that close call, I made it a hard rule to aim for a 20% arrival state of charge just to give us room to breathe when the weather turned ugly. Later in the trip when we encountered unexpected Texas winds, we didn’t have to sweat it.

Second, you rarely charge past 80% on the road because the charging speeds drop off a cliff as charging tapers to protect the battery. Going to 100% means spending anywhere from 1.5–2.5 hours depending on the truck. If you are unplugging at 80% and aiming to arrive at your next stop at 20%, you are only using 60% of your battery pack for actual driving.

When you apply that 60% most-usable window to a 130 kWh battery, you only have 78 kWh to work with. At 0.9 miles/kWh, your leg-to-leg towing range shrinks to exactly 70 miles. If you are driving 65 miles per hour, you are stopping to charge every 65 minutes.

In a Tesla Cybertruck with its 123 kWh pack, the math is even worse. You get about 66 miles of ideal range between chargers, meaning you have to pull over and plug in barely an hour after you hit the highway.

You aren’t road-tripping at that point. You are just crawling from plug to plug and/or spending as much time at chargers as you are moving.

Brute Force: How Our 170 kWh Truck Solves This Problem

This is where GM’s strategy largely neutralizes the problem. The Silverado EV was designed with an exceptionally high floor. It’s slightly more work to get into, but that architecture gives it the physical room to house a massive 170 kWh battery pack (a 205 kWh battery pack is also available, but that reduces towing capacity from 12,500 lb to 10,000). It doesn’t try to be hyper-efficient to solve the towing problem. It simply brute forces the aerodynamic penalty with raw capacity so you can still have reasonable times driving between chargers.

Even sitting at 0.9 miles/kWh pulling the heavy inTech, that big pack gave us a theoretical range of just over 150 miles. By utilizing that capacity, we naturally fell into a rhythm of doing 90- to 110-mile legs (staying between 20% and 80%). That gave us about an hour and a half to two hours of solid driving between stops while still keeping that crucial 20% weather buffer in our back pocket.

Having that much battery also completely changes how you experience the charging curve. You want to stay in the fastest part of the curve. Even though our extended range Silverado EV is capped at 310 kW, we could roll into a station as high as 40% and watch the electrons pour in at top speed for a bit. You don’t have to dip below 10% to get max charging speeds. The tapering wasn’t that noticeable until around 60%, and it didn’t get terribly slow until well after 80%. We usually set our target for 70% or 80% and got back on the highway in about a half hour.

This means that we spent more time driving than charging, often by a ratio of 3:1 (1.5 hours driving for a half hour charging). This might sound terrible if you’re an astronaut diaper-wearing road warrior pulling a 40-foot fifth wheel for six hours between stops, but in my experience towing with ICE trucks, someone in my family is always ready for a break before even two hours has passed. Get enough humans in a truck with biological needs that aren’t perfectly synchronized, and hardly anyone can RV faster than you can towing with a Silverado EV.

On last year’s trip towing with a Suburban, we didn’t get there faster. Someone’s always wanting to stop and take a break. Charging almost always happens when we were going to stop anyway.

All of this having been said, a reality of electric RVing (like all-electric road-tripping) is that the truck is often ready before you are. We would be eating a meal, taking a nap, or just resting in the camper. Instead of rushing back to the cab when it hit 80% or whatever was strictly needed to reach the next stop, we often just let it keep charging, sometimes all the way to 100%. Then we would rethink our next stop. 

We even had a few hot days where the truck suggested turning off the cabin AC to charge faster. We had the option to retreat to the camper, but sometimes we just chose to wait a few extra minutes so we wouldn’t have to drop the stairs and move everyone to the camper for shorter charging stops.

Bottom line: 170 or 205 kWh is enough to align RVing with human needs. Smaller batteries just aren’t up to that unless you pull a small teardrop, pop-up, or A-frame camper (a good choice for many families and individuals).

Infrastructure Reality: ABRP, Pilot Stops, and Pull-Throughs

The physical infrastructure is still the biggest hurdle for electric towing, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.

First, the software gap is real for many vehicles. Some trucks do have better software, but the built-in Google Maps navigation in my truck simply cannot compensate for the range hit of adding a trailer. The Guess-O-Meter did a decent job of adjusting on the fly, but for actual route planning, I had to rely completely on A Better Routeplanner (ABRP). I spent the first few days of the trip having ABRP “predict” routes I had just finished, tweaking the settings until I had it get things right.

Another important skill for electric towing is comparing the guess-o-meter to the remaining miles to the destination. It’s good to aim for 30–40 miles of excess range as you drive (with my rig, 30 miles is 20%). If you notice the gap shrinking, it’s your signal to slow down (often due to wind) to preserve range and not run out. If you notice the reserve miles growing (often due to a tailwind), you can speed up a bit to make better time. It’s crude, but effective, allowing you to still get there when ABRP can’t predict Oklahoma thunderstorms perfectly.

Once we had the software figured out, we had to figure out how to navigate the physical station layouts. We managed to charge without unhooking almost every single time. However, it required precision driving and skill at backing up, hunting for end-cap chargers, and occasionally blocking unused parts of parking lots. Using little tricks and scouting ahead with aerial imagery and street view, we only had to unhook at one Tesla Supercharger and one Pilot/EVgo station during the whole trip.

I’ve been writing about the partnership between GM, Pilot, and EVgo since it was first announced, and I even reviewed my first one back in 2024. In 2026, we again saw that when these stations are built out correctly, they’re exactly what we needed. We would roll into a Pilot location late at night and pull right into a dedicated, canopy-covered EV pull-through stall. We could plug in, get ready for bed in the camper while the truck charged, and then simply pull forward into a standard RV parking space to sleep. In the morning, we would sometimes pull back around to top up while making breakfast and taking showers before hitting the highway. It completely eliminated the stress of the charging stop.

Sadly, many Pilot/Flying J/One9 stations don’t have pull-thru charging. I know their existing truck stops often don’t have room for that, but they really need to work on that more. This was especially obvious in the South along I-20, a highway I drove from end to end on this trip. I somehow managed to charge without unhooking in nearly all cases, but it was a hassle future EV truck owners won’t want to put up with.

Finally, there’s the problem of price. The savings of driving an electric vehicle at home, including trucks, is undeniable. But get out on the road and start paying 50, 60, 70 cents for each killowatt-hour, and the cost savings stop happening. It becomes more expensive to tow a travel trailer with an electric truck than a gas or diesel truck.

This is something the industry needs to do better at, even if charging providers have gotten better at reliability during the last two years.

The Industry Delusion: Why “Mini-Trucks” Alone Won’t Save Electric Trucks

After 9,000 miles, it’s clear that the industry’s pivot toward only selling smaller, cheaper electric truck platforms is a big mistake. The sad truth is that even full-sized trucks fail when they have 130 kWh or less. Smaller platforms like the upcoming Ford Universal Vehicle truck or the Slate will be great for suburban and urban duty, but will fall far short of expectations even pulling small teardrop trailers.

GM didn’t just get this right with big batteries. The company got it right by making big batteries an option. The platform was made to handle over 200 kWh of battery, but it’s available with 170 kWh or 119 kWh, and may eventually be available with a range extender. It would be downright silly to sell everyone a giant battery, but having it available for people who need it makes sense.

In a time when “consumer choice” is raised as an argument for abandoning or scaling back EV efforts, it’s the big batteries that actually give the industry the ability to literally deal with headwinds.

Conclusion: The Verdict from A Trip Around The US

Mechanically, electric towing is an absolute dream. The torque, the silent power, and the stability are unmatched. It’s really a far better experience, and that’s before you consider that you can power a travel trailer off-grid.

But if automakers want truck buyers to actually ditch gas and diesel, they have to stop optimizing their platforms for suburban commuters. They need to build trucks with the battery capacity available to do real work over long distances in terrible weather. Right now, GM is the only one truly offering that.

If you want to read more about the actual route, how the truck performed in the national parks, and the day-to-day realities of living out of an EV-powered rig for months on end, head over to Charge To The Parks to follow the rest of the journey.

All images by Jennifer Sensiba.