Tone down the falling lumber, avalanches of boulders and slow-motion suspension sag as a super-sized truck bed swallows all that dreck. Cowboy cosplay never gets old and certainly sells some trucks, but we just don’t work that tough—at least not the majority of the 2.5 million Americans who bought a pickup truck last year. The rig has largely taken the place of the minivan, the sedan and pretty much everything in between. It’s even hauling off a hunk of the SUV market.
So when it comes to the parade of electric pickup trucks finally heading to dealerships and directly to customers—at least a dozen are in the works—auto executives finally have an easy answer to the industry’s perennial question: Who’s going to buy this thing?
imply put: most everyone who drives.
“We’re seeing customers come out of just about everything,” says RJ Scaringe, founder and chief executive officer of Rivian Automotive Inc., which is expected to launch one of the first battery-powered pickups in June. “Of course, [they’re] coming out of pickups, but often—more likely—coming out of SUVs, out of other electric vehicles.”
Truck Country
Share of U.S. pickup truck sales by state.
Source: IHS/Markit
The hurdles, for Scaringe and his rivals, aren’t insignificant. For one, many of the promised pickups are coming from startups that have never built a thing, let alone spent decades fine-tuning supply chains and ecosystems of dealers and service infrastructure. Already, some of those in the e-truck race are struggling to pick up any speed, let alone finish.
The window stickers will be supersized as well. While a bare-bones Ford Ranger that runs on dinosaur goo can be had for about $25,000, analysts expect the simplest of these quiet rigs to command close to $50,000. General Motors plans to get six figures for its GMC Hummer EV, as does Bollinger, one of the newbies. Government subsidies for going green would help. Those have been hard to come by under President Donald Trump, but are expected to grow under President-elect Joe Biden, who has promised a huge expansion of charging stations.
Not that persuading Americans to plug in their vehicles has ever been an easy sell. EVs occupy just about 2% of the U.S. market, and the vast majority of those sales belong to one company, Tesla. A combination of lax environmental regulations and Americans’ fear of running out of juice has left the U.S. badly trailing China and Europe in EV uptake.
In the past decade, the $90 billion U.S. truck market has veered notably toward buyers like Danielle Woodford. The Charleston, South Carolina, medical researcher just ditched her Volvo station wagon for a Ford F-150 with plush trim and a touch-screen dash. Woodford mostly ferries her two young daughters around town in the pickup. Twice a month, when she stages apartments for local realtors, the F-150’s bed comes in handy for furniture. Plus, the heated seats and buttery leather are more opulent than what her old Volvo offered.
“It won’t fit in the parking garage near my work … and it has a hell of a blind spot,” she explains. “The girls love it though. We just went to the drive-in theater and got to sit in the bed.”
Texas is still America’s truck capital, accounting for almost one in eight pickup sales. However, it is closely followed by California and Florida, hardly the heartland. New York comes in No. 5 in truck sales, with almost 4% of the market.
Urban Cowboys
The truck market in the past decade has steadily crept from farm and ranch country to more diverse economies.
Source: IHS Markit
It’s not that wheat farmers and cattle ranchers are switching to hatchbacks. Rather, families have realized that a pickup handles a Costco run with ease—and relative efficiency. Woodford’s new rig has a supersized cab but still manages 22 miles per gallon. The trucks have been pulling in a widening demographic of weekend warriors as sales of towable campers, boats and other five-figure toys surged in recent years. Last year, U.S. consumers bought 280,000 boats, the second-highest tally since 2007, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association.
None of this was lost on the auto executives as they started to greenlight a crush of electric trucks. Hau Thai-Tang, Ford Motor Co.’s head of product development, said the company is sanguine about electrification. “I personally think the transition will play out faster than most people think,” he explains. “I don’t think it’s going to be linear; I think we’ll reach an inflection point,” in the next few years.
Thai-Tang noted that the pickup market in particular has two features that work well with electric drivetrains: It’s huge and relatively lucrative. The scale and padding on the sticker price push the unit economics into profit faster than they would on, say, a compact electric sedan.
The pickup crowd is not, traditionally, the greenest consumer demographic. But it does pay attention to technology gains and puts a premium on curbside appeal. Gary Silberg, head of the auto sector at consultant KPMG, thinks tradesmen and ranchers may not jump into electric trucks right away, but he expects orders to flow in from “a new breed of buyer looking to make a statement.” Consider Rihanna, who took part in the unveiling of Rivian’s pickup prototype in Los Angeles. “That’s the new market opportunity,” Silberg says. “That was chic and cool and went right at the Hollywood crowd.”