Weeks before a group of General Motors engineers were set to test the limits of an electric Chevrolet Silverado’s battery, the goalposts moved.
Starting last fall, the group had been planning a challenge for the 2026 Chevy Silverado EV Max Range Work Truck. They wanted to see just how far they could drive on a single charge. But the world record they’d been eyeing suddenly jumped after EV startup Lucid achieved the Guinness World Record for the longest trip by an EV on a single charge: 749 miles.
“When, just a couple of weeks before we started the test, Lucid broke that record and hit 749, we kinda were a little bit nervous about it,” Jon Doremus, engineering manager for EV propulsion calibration at GM, told Tech Brew.
They needn’t have worried; the GM team would go on to shatter that record with a 1,059.2-mile run.
How it started: The test began as a passion project among GM engineers who plotted ways to make the vehicle, which clocks in with an EPA-estimated range of 493 miles, as efficient as possible.
“It started as a conversation amongst a few of the engineers in the building when we saw the latest EPA range of the Silverado work truck,” Doremus recalled. “And we started just talking about, what do you think we could do to maximize that, and how far do you think we could actually go in a truck? And that turned into more people getting excited about it and joining in.”
The team quickly decided it would make sense to conduct the test during the summer. Over the next several months, they brainstormed and came up with strategies for optimal battery efficiency.
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That included limiting the truck’s speed to 20–25 mph, removing the vehicle’s spare tire, adding a tonneau cover to improve airflow, turning off climate control, lowering the windshield wiper blade to reduce drag, and inflating the truck’s tires to their max PSI.
When it came time for the actual test, 40 people volunteered to take hour-long shifts driving. They drove on public roads near GM’s Milford Proving Ground in southeast Michigan and ended on Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit.
“It turned into a pretty fun event because we started recording the efficiency of each person’s drive and competing in that sense,” Doremus said.
When the team hit Lucid’s world record, the truck still had plenty of battery capacity remaining.
“So it was something we stopped briefly and celebrated, and then got back in and started pushing to try to get 1,000 right away,” Doremus said. “Once we hit 1,000, that was the really big milestone that everyone wanted to hit.”
Practical application: Players in the EV sector are continually working on innovations in battery technology as they attempt to improve range and bring down costs. According to GM, the insights this voluntary exercise yielded will help inform future product development.
“Getting this kind of range on a full charge doesn’t happen by accident,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s VP of battery, propulsion, and sustainability, said in a statement. “It takes deep integration across battery chemistry, drive unit efficiency, software and vehicle engineering—and that’s exactly what the team delivered. 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.”