Silverado EV

Make
Chevrolet
Segment
Sports Car

At the start of 2022, General Motors revealed the all-new Chevrolet Silverado EV, an all-electric work truck with 664 horsepower and up to 400 miles of range. Those impressive figures come courtesy of its Ultium powertrain, and thanks to a new patented innovation that Chevrolet has revealed, there's now even more reason to love the clever technology underpinning this alternative to the already-sold-out Ford F-150 Lightning.

The Detroit-based Bowtie brand has announced that, as standard, its Ultium-based EVs can capture and repurpose waste energy from the battery, with this waste energy able to "increase a vehicle's range, reduce battery energy needed for heating, increase charging speed, and even enable sportier driving."

As we all know, the components that make up an electric powertrain, from the electronics to the motors, all produce heat, but so do the bodies of the vehicle occupants, so GM says that its system can also capture and use humidity including body heat from passengers. This stored energy can be deployed to "heat the cabin more quickly in cold weather than comparable systems found in vehicles with an internal combustion engine."

Furthermore, this stored energy can provide the EV with as much as 10% more range, and "with its active heating capabilities, Ultium vehicles can also potentially charge more efficiently by preconditioning, or warming up, the batteries before charging."

This energy recovery system can also precool the propulsion system on the GMC Hummer EV, allowing its available Watts to Freedom (launch control) feature to consistently return 0-60-mph sprint times of around three seconds. While GM has only just begun to explore mainstream EV production, it credits the ancestry of the patented invention to similar principles first explored with the heat pump of the conglomerate's first EV, the EV1 from the late 1990s.

With cross-town rival Ford already selling out, additional features like this one will help GM lure more buyers in, but based on the demand already recorded for its Silverado and Hummer EVs, Ford will be watching closely anyway.