S-10 EV Paved Road for GMC Hummer EV Decades Ago
Powered by the same setup in the EV-1, S-10 Electric one of the rarest pickups around, sent all of its electric ponies to the front.
You’ve all seen it by now, especially if you’ve been pulling for the Los Angeles Dodgers or Tampa Bay Rays over the past week. GMC finally resurrected the Hummer name, this time for use on a beefy, spicy, hefty boy of a pickup truck: the Hummer EV.
Though Chevy doesn’t have a badass 1,000-horsepower EV truck of its own (yet), it did pave the way for the Hummer EV all the way back in the mid-Nineties. The Fast Lane Truck happened upon its ancestor recently, and it was known as the S-10 Electric.
According to TFL Truck, only 492 S-10 Electric copies were built between 1997 and 1998 for their respective model years. Of those, just 60 were sold to fleets, since the regular S-10 had already been crash-tested and certed. The rest were leased before returning to GM to be destroyed, a fate which also fell upon its sibling, the EV-1.
Both the S-10 Electric and the EV-1 had one other thing in common: the powertrain. Under the hood lived an 85-watt, 114-horsepower electric motor. However, the power went to the front wheels, as it was set to do so already in the EV-1. We can only wonder what it was like to be pulled along.
Not that you’d be going far in an S-10 Electric. Range on a single charge with the ’97 and its lead acid pack came out to 45.5 city/60 highway/47 combined MPGe. The ’98 model with the more expensive nickel-metal hyrdride battery fared a little better, at around 90 combined MPGe. Either way, you weren’t going fast in the S-10: just 50 mph.
According to The Drive, those who bought one of the 60 S-10 Electric trucks paid $33,305 ($54,010.13 in 2020 bucks). That’s a pretty penny to pay for the truck, considering gas-powered S-10s could be had for around $13,000 to $20,000 in 1997 ($21,081.87 to $32,433.64 in 2020). If only they could see how much its descendant would rake in, though.
Photos: Wikimedia Commons, The Fast Lane Truck, GM Heritage Center
Join the Chevrolet Forums now!
