Who’s winning the electric pickup truck sales race?

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With the bulk of the automotive industry’s electric vehicle offerings coming in the form of vehicles most buyers no longer crave, assessing true electric vehicle demand across North America is proving near impossible.

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However, the next 12-24 months will write an entirely different story with pickup trucks from traditional truck makers in Detroit already amassing over 300,000 orders.

Above and beyond all of the other reasons that gauging real-world EV demand is such a challenge — government incentives, poor supply, weak infrastructure, a pandemic — the simple fact that there are few buyers for small hatchbacks and quirky-looking sedans also means there aren’t that many buyers for small hatchbacks and quirky-looking sedans that happen to be electric . What about premium EV SUVs and EV supercars? This isn’t where we’re going to see meaningful volume, either.

But when EVs move into the realm of pickup trucks, where the excessive weight of batteries can be more easily masked and enormous levels of EV torque becomes both fun and useful, all bets are off.

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As recently as 2015, there were more than twice as many cars sold as pickups. Fast forward to 2021 and pickup trucks produced better than one out of every five new vehicles sold in Canada. With 21 per cent market share, pickups actually outsold the entire passenger car sector by an 8-per-cent margin.

Yet plenty of automobile manufacturers, even those with deep ties to the truck market, do not presently have an EV truck on the horizon. Toyota, Nissan, and Honda haven’t yet revealed an electric truck; an EV Ram isn’t due until 2024.

So who’s leading the charge in the race to deliver electric pickups to customers in significant numbers?

Well, if you believe in the theoretical, the answer’s obvious: the Tesla Cybertruck. Sure, Amazon-backed Rivian is sitting on roughly 71,000 orders for its R1T pickup (including orders for the R1S SUV) and has already delivered around 1,000 trucks. But until Rivian proves it’s capable of building at least 1,000 R1Ts per month  — small potatoes in the North American truck world — the brand’s sales results won’t generate any headlines.

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Tesla, meanwhile, reportedly has orders for 1.25 million Cybertrucks . (There are even reports suggesting there could be over three million Cybertruck orders.) With Tesla, of course, there are caveats. Major caveats.

First, these are merely refundable $100 orders for a truck that was promised to be delivered in 2021. Second, Tesla has a history of arriving very late to its own party. Third, the second caveat is already ringing true: Tesla is now acknowledging that the Cybertruck, which barely seemed plausible when first unveiled as a potential at $39,900 USD, won’t appear until 2023 at the earliest. Fourth, Tesla boss Elon Musk is prone to distraction, as evidenced by rejigged focus outside of the auto market . “I think actually the most important product development we’re doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot,” Musk said in January’s earnings call. “This, I think, has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time.”

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This leaves us with the upcoming trucks from North America’s two top-selling truck makers: Ford and General Motors.

Between the pair, there are 329,000 intended buyers for the Ford F-150 Lightning, Chevrolet Silverado EV, and GMC Hummer EV.

At Ford, the F-150 Lightning’s 160,000 orders make Ford’s original plans to build 70,000-80,000 electric trucks per year sound silly. Ford has already initiated plans to double build capacity on the strength of Lightning reservations . Ford intends to begin delivering F-150 Lightnings in the first-half of 2022.

Although the Lightning appears very much to be an F-150-turned-electric, GM’s Silverado EV is not an electrified version of the conventional Silverado. It’s an entirely different animal. GM’s holding 110,000 reservations for the Chevrolet Silverado EV, which is still more than a year away from reaching dealers.

General Motors wants to be able to build 600,000 electric pickups per year by 2025. Some of those trucks will be GMC Hummer EVs. There are some 59,000 reservations for the Hummer EV, deliveries of which begin in earnest this quarter.

There were 16.7 million vehicles sold in the United States and Canada in 2021, 3.17 million of which were were pickup trucks with internal combustion engines.