Safety Group Faces Weight Challenges Testing Electric Pickups
Full-size electric pickup models need large battery packs to give them enough driving range, but they pack on the pounds.
The 200 kilowatt-hour battery in the GMC Hummer EV, for example, weighs nearly 3,000 pounds, pushing the truck's total weight to more than 9,000 pounds.
The currently available version of the Hummer EV weighs so much that it's classified the same as GM's heavy-duty truck models and doesn't need to get a crash-test rating, but there are slightly lighter trucks that do. The gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) limit for a light-duty truck is 8,500 pounds, and that's the combined weight of the vehicle and how much it can carry.
These are challenges for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Fox News reports. The nonprofit tests vehicles with the goal of reducing deaths and injuries on the road.
The heaviest vehicle the organization has tested to date was an Audi e-tron electric SUV that weighed in at 6103 pounds, but the Rivian R1T electric midsize pickup that it recently acquired for evaluation weighs a little more than 7,000 pounds and sits right at that GVWR limit.
Before it tested the modern machine, the IIHS wanted to make sure equipment could accelerate vehicles like it up to speed properly, so it filled up a couple of old trucks with steel plates and concrete blocks to get them up to around 9,500 pounds.
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Source: Fox News
