One of the biggest questions surrounding this new era of powerful long-range electric cars and trucks is just how well those vehicles fare when towing a trailer. Countless Americans use their vehicles to tow campers, cars, motorcycles, or equipment, but what does that do to an EV’s battery, and why? One YouTuber set out to find out the truth about how EV towing works in the real world, and the result was, to me, enlightening. And my own testing backs him up.
This comes to us from Robert Dunn of the YouTube channel Aging Wheels. If you’ve somehow made it this far in your car enthusiasm without finding his channel, you’re missing out. Dunn has spent years saving some of the most unloved cars on the planet, from forgotten Coda electric cars to even the recalled and disposed of ElectraMeccanica. Dunn’s fleet includes cheerful two-stroke cars, a broken electric clone of a Smart Fortwo, a Reliant Robin, and so much more.
One of Dunn’s more recent acquisitions is the current king of electric pickup trucks, the Chevrolet Silverado EV – or more specifically, a Silverado EV WT, which was the subject of his testing. Modern EVs have their limitations, and one of them is that towing with an EV absolutely guzzles the poor battery, which takes a while (and money!) to refill.
It’s common to see the range of an electric pickup truck sliced effectively in half if you tow a big enough trailer. That’s not much different than how towing a big trailer kills a gas engine’s fuel economy, but while it’ll take you five minutes to refill a gas truck, an EV will need at least 30 minutes to get range worth using, or longer if you’re unlucky enough to not have found a super fast charger.
GM’s gotten around this by loading the Silverado EV down with a huge battery – up to 205 kWh, in fact. This battery is so huge that the Silverado EV weighs around 8,500 pounds on a good day. Depending on the version of the Silverado EV chosen, you can get up to 492 miles of range unloaded. Content creators have proven that the Silverado EV is the undisputed champion of EV hauling, as it’s capable of pulling large trailers over 200 miles per charge. That’s a long way, but drastically less range than the Silverado achieves when it’s not hauling a load. Let’s dig into what has the biggest impact on the truck’s loss of range.
Big Trucks And Bigger Trailers
If you read or watch towing tests, you might think weight plays a big role, and of course, it does, though its significance depends on driving conditions. The guys of The Fast Lane Truck hitched a 6,000-pound enclosed cargo trailer to a Silverado EV and managed to get 230 miles of range out of the truck. Zack of JerryRigEverything hooked 11,000 pounds of trailer and Humvee up to a Silverado EV and got 177 miles of range; not bad.
Back in 2022, Car and Driver made a Ford F-150 Lightning, a GMC Hummer EV, and a Rivian R1T tow the same 6,100-pound, 29-foot camper. The results were illuminating, with the Ford getting only 100 miles of towing range, or less than half of the 230 miles of highway range that it has when unloaded. The winner of the test was the GMC Hummer EV, which went only 140 miles against the 290 miles that it could do at the same speed while empty.
If you read no further than the headlines, you might think the weight is the huge deal here. TFL‘s truck got better range with a lighter trailer than Zack did with a heavier rig. Car and Driver did not mention the frontal area or aerodynamics of the camper at all, and instead focused on weight and length.
Even I made this mistake.
Last week, GM loaned me a 2025 Chevy Silverado EV Trail Boss. GM says that, empty, my Trail Boss loaner, which has the 205 kWh Max Range battery, should be able to hit 478 miles of range. When charged to full, the range estimator in my specific unit claimed a range of 469 miles and quoted a manufacturer-rated efficiency of 2.0 miles per kWh.
I performed a real-world towing test by hooking up my family’s 2022 Heartland Mallard M33. This trailer weighs about 7,746 pounds and stretches 36 feet, 9 inches in length. This wasn’t originally the plan. The trailer I was supposed to pull was a 2007 Adirondack 31BH, which is roughly two feet shorter and 1,400 pounds lighter. Clearly, I was going to get a worse range because of weight, right?
I ended up towing the trailer 130 miles in both directions. I averaged 0.9 miles per kWh on the way to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, from my home in Illinois, with the air-conditioning off. I arrived at camp with a 24 percent remaining charge after consuming 71 percent of the battery. I then let the truck sit overnight, and by the next mornin the truck actually read 28 percent charge.
The drive home was much harder, as the temperature was above 90 degrees and there was a wicked crosswind. On that trip, the truck averaged 0.7 miles per kWh for about a third of the drive. That’s 0.7 mi/kWh while driving at a slower 60 mph, too. Things got much better in Milwaukee, and I was able to increase speed back to 65 mph while efficiency rose to 0.9 mi/kWh. That time, I arrived home with 22 percent charge after consuming 70 percent of the battery, which included air-conditioning.
Unloaded without a trailer and going the same speed, my Trail Boss tester got 2.1 miles per kWh. That means the trailer absolutely destroyed the truck’s range. In theory, had I driven through the entire pack, I could have only gone about 184 miles on a charge.
What was so range-sucking about the trailer? As Dunn of Aging Wheels explains, when cruising on relatively flat freeway, weight itself isn’t a dominant factor when it comes to range. What matters most is how aerodynamic your trailer is.
Aero Means More Than Weight
To prove this, Dunn drove his Silverado EV on the highway at 75 mph with the bed completely empty, and then drove it overloaded. How overloaded? Dunn said he put just under 1,600 pounds of shingles into the bed. His Silverado EV has a payload of around 1,400 pounds, so the truck was overloaded by close to 200 pounds before he even got into the driver’s seat.
The Silverado EV has a nerdy graph that shows energy usage down to the tenth while also dividing up where the power went. This graph is super neat because now you know how much juice an air-conditioner uses! For the test, Dunn drove his truck about 60 miles, averaging 1.86 mi/kWh and consuming 31.8 kWh of the battery when empty.
Overloaded, the truck consumed 33.4 kWh for an average of 1.78 kWh. That’s barely any difference despite having nearly 1,600 pounds of extra weight. Dunn notes that the tonneau cover was closed during the empty run but open during the loaded run, and that alone might have accounted for much of the slight difference in range.
Just for curiosity’s sake, Dunn did the same test in a gas-powered F-150, scoring 16.7 mpg on the unloaded run and 16.6 mpg with almost 1,600 pounds of shingles. The difference was so little between the two that the results were effectively within the margin of error. In other words, a huge payload didn’t make a noteworthy impact to fuel economy at highway speed.
Okay, sure, but what about trailer towing? Here’s where things got fun. First, Dunn drove the Silverado EV empty for 60 miles at 75 mph on the same highway loop that he used for testing payload. Empty, the truck scored 1.93 mi/kWh.
First, Dunn hitched up a mostly empty flatbed trailer. Doing the same loop with the trailer resulted in 1.45 mi/kWh efficiency.
For the next test, Dunn took the wood that was already on the trailer and fashioned it into a wall, sort of like the kind of front wall that an enclosed cargo trailer would have. Dunn notes that he didn’t add or take anything away, but just rearranged it. This time, the truck gobbled up its battery at 0.72 mi/kWh.
Now, just to prove his point that weight doesn’t matter as much as wind resistance and drag, Dunn parked his 4,500-pound Polestar 2 on the trailer and kept the wind brake in place. The result? Adding 4,500 pounds of weight resulted in an efficiency of 0.71 mi/kWh. In other words, having the giant wall in the wind made a far bigger impact than weight.
Then, just for giggles, Dunn took the wall away and left the car naked on the trailer. This time, the truck averaged 1.09 mi/kWh. Dunn also hauled his F-150 behind the Silverado EV, and got 0.94 mi/kWh.
Dunn elaborated that his tests support his findings. In all cases, adding weight did not impact range much. In two cases, the change of range because of adding weight was within the margin of error. However, changing the frontal profile of the trailer made an incredible impact.
Based on my experience towing a camper with a Silverado EV, Dunn’s giant plywood wall is a decent simulation of what towing an enclosed cargo trailer or a camper would be like with the Silverado EV. Many campers do have some slight aero action going on in their front caps, which is very likely why my efficiency was 0.9 mi/kWh in calm winds and on level ground.
I thought that weight was a huge reason behind why the Silverado was so thirsty, but Dunn’s tests show that it almost certainly wasn’t the weight, but the fact that I was pulling an 11-foot, 6-inch tall brick through the wind.
Later in the video, Dunn also got a friend with a Rivian R1T to tow a U-Haul cargo trailer. Dunn towed the same trailer with his Silverado EV. The result? Both trucks consumed very close to the same amount of energy to tow the same trailers. This is despite the fact that the Rivian is more efficient when unloaded.
Your Mileage May Vary
I think there’s enough evidence here to support Dunn’s conclusion. While it sounds impressive to be able to tow an 11,000-pound trailer 177 miles on a charge, it seems what matters most is how aerodynamic that load is, rather than how heavy it is. By that measure, me being able to tow a tall camper 130 miles while still having a quarter of my battery pack left is actually seriously cool. Trucks with smaller batteries wouldn’t be able to do that.
[Ed Note: A lot of this can actually be simulated by determining “road load” of the truck-trailer pairing. Typically automakers do this via coast-down tests (SAE J1263), which basically involve running a vehicle/vehicle-trailer pair up to speed, then measuring the change in its velocity over time (deceleration). From this, you get a curve, which you can use to back out some coast down coefficients — also called “abc coefficients” — which represent rolling resistance, drivetrain friction, and aerodynamic drag. Here’s the basic formula for a coast down curve:
F = a + b * v + c * v^2
In this formula, “c” is aerodynamic drag term, and depending upon the vehicle and driving conditions, it begins to dominate at a certain vehicle speed. Here’s a typical plot showing a vehicle’s road load as a function of vehicle speed, with the plot broken down into aerodynamics and rolling resistance (which is of course related to vehicle weight (well, normal force) through the coefficient of rolling resistance):
The plot, which comes from a nonprofit climate-focused research organization out of the Netherlands called TNO, shows that, in this case, at about 45 mph, aerodynamic drag dominates rolling resistance. From TNO:
Over the vehicle speed range the rolling resistance force is fairly constant and only slightly dependent on vehicle speed. However the aerodynamic drag force depends strongly on vehicle speed. Effectively from 0 – 40 km/h the vehicle resistance mainly depends on rolling resistances and at higher speeds (> 80 km/h) the aerodynamic drag is mainly responsible for the total vehicle resistance.
TNO shows an example of what changing weight does to overall road load:
If you look at the “RW” (Real World) columns, you’ll see that increasing the weight of a 3,360 pound vehicle by 450-ish pounds really doesn’t change the road load (overall drag) much, but increasing vehicle speed by even 12.4 mph — especially at higher speeds — has a huge effect. Obviously, this is a tiny amount of weight compared to 6,000 pounds of cargo being added to a truck/trailer combo, but with a super heavy load you basically just shift the green rolling resistance line from the previous plot upwards. Maybe that moves the point where aero dominates from 45 mph to 50 mph, depending upon the vehicle. But certainly by the time you get to U.S. freeway speeds, it’s all about aero.
Anyway, I found those curves online and wanted to share them. -DT]
Thus, the Silverado EV retains its crown as the electric towing champ. However, there’s still a caveat. Before you think about driving across the country in your electric pickup truck that’s towing a trailer, you should know that pull-through charging stations are still rare in many regions of America. This means that you’ll likely need to detach your trailer every single time that you need to charge.
Likewise, the speed at which your truck will charge will depend on not just the rated kW output of the charger, but its cooling capabilities, too. Currently, if you hook a GM electric truck up to some Tesla Superchargers, as I have, your charge will start off at 178 kW, then quickly fall to 60 kW before recovering to 70 kW. Because of the fact that America’s charging infrastructure isn’t quite ready for electric tow vehicles yet, an electric pickup is not the truck I would use if I am regularly towing long distances. David Tracy came to a similar conclusion last year.
But if you’re looking for an electric pickup truck that retains good towing range when hooked up to a trailer, the Silverado EV is currently the king. Stay tuned for my full review of this truck, because I was thoroughly impressed!
I also recommend watching this Aging Wheels video and more. Dunn’s video details far more than I wrote here, and covers the cost to charge such a behemoth truck as well as what bizarre quality issues it’s suffering from. Click here to watch more!
I keep banging this drum when I see articles about EVs being too heavy. I own a BMW i3 and a Kia Niro EV. The i3 is quite bit shorter, has a much smaller battery and uses carbon fiber to keep weight down, so it is 1000lbs lighter. However, the two cars have identical Cd and frontal areas, and so have identical efficiencies on the highway. At 75mph they both average 3.2-3.5 miles/kWh depending on the day.
Also, only noobs turn off the AC to save driving range. In all EVs, but especially in rolling bricks that 2 miles/kWh, the energy consumption of the AC is so minimal it’s not even worth considering unless you are trying to limp somewhere on the last dregs of a charge.
The problematic charging infrastructure situation is one of the reasons I’m excited for the Ram charger and other range extended EVs, theoretically you get the benefits from both ICE and electric vehicles.
It would also be helpful if the trailer contained batteries for use on the haul. I mean, that is a lot of floor for them.
People forget about the v^2 in that the force increases with the square of the velocity so going faster creates more force non-linearly so towing slower really helps.
Yes. I have so little sympathy for jerks in lifted F150s/250s blowing past me at 10+ over the limit when they complain about the price of gas.
Making the trip from Seattle to Sacramento, my ’17 Accord V6 routinely gets upper 30s to 40 mpg, depending on which way the wind is blowing (which does affect the v^2 part of the calculus). I could drive faster, risk a speeding ticket and spend more money on fuel. To maybe shave at most, 30 minutes off the length of the trip. But I don’t. It’s a no-brainer for me.
I get about 12mpg pulling my camper (which admittedly is smaller and and more aerodynamic than the big box here). At $3 per gallon, that’s about 25 cents per mile for fuel. If I got 1 mile per kw towing, it’s cheaper for that initial charge at my house (I pay about 12 cents per kwh off peak to charge our PHEV), but once I’m charging on the road, that’s typically 35-45 cents per kwh or more at a DCFC station, making gas considerably cheaper. Sounds like I still need that PHEV truck for towing instead of an electric. I bet it’s great to tow with that EV (torque, weight of the truck, etc.) but I don’t want to deal with charging on the road when pulling a trailer.
I stumbled across some low mile used Silverado EVs and they might just be the best deal out there for used EVs at the moment. Sub 10k mile 2024 4WT models with the monster battery are out there with asking prices in the low 40k range, which is barely half of MSRP for a year old truck.
Wow, you aren’t wrong. That’s quite a good deal. It actually looks like there are some new ones out there advertised for the mid 50’s ($20-25k off MSRP).
Very interesting, Mercedes. Thanks for another great article. Just a reminder to everyone that, even under the worst conditions (with the giant wind brake on the trailer), the EV truck still ran at (0.72 miles/kwh)(33.7 kwh/gal) = 24.3 miles/gal of gasoline, equivalent. And Mercedes’ 0.9 mi/kwh is equivalent to 30.3 mi/gal of gasoline. So even though that’s a big decrease from their unloaded efficiency, EV trucks are much more energy-efficient than ICE trucks under all conditions. Sure that requires a big-ass battery, so a hybrid setup might be a better solution overall, for towing especially, but if solid state batteries ever hit the market, the improvement in charging speeds might make up for the more limited range of an EV.
“Aero Means More Than Weight”
The faster you go, the more aerodynamics matter.
Conversely, if you’re towing a big assed trailer, you can extend your range greatly and/or greatly improve your efficiency by simply dropping your speed to 55mph instead of doing 75mph.
That’s why I reduced my speed to 55-60 mph when efficiency really took a hit, and never exceeded 65 mph. Thankfully, it’s not hard to find a semi going 65, so I wasn’t exactly the odd one out.
Did you try sucking up to the back of the semi as close as you dared for a bit to see what a huge difference that makes?
I did that with our Tacoma towing a small camper and wow what a difference.
BTW Another great article
Thanks
“at about 45 mph, aerodynamic drag dominates rolling resistance”
Well there’s your answer. Just drive in the right lane at the minimum legal speed limit.
It depends whether money or time efficiency are your primary goals. For EVs with fast enough charging and a long enough trip(whether towing or not), going slow for energy efficiency doesn’t necessarily save time. Even more so if you plan your charging stops thoughtfully to line up with meal breaks and activities.
I have a few towing efficiency observations from towing the same 28′ enclosed trailer from Chicago to Denver and back with these 3 vehicles:
2001 yukon xl 2500 with the 8.1L engine. It typically got high 9’s to low 10’s on the highway. With trailer on that trip it averaged 7.8.
2015 Silverado 1500 with the 5.2? V8. Typically it gets 20-24 on the highway. With trailer it got 5.1 with pure unleaded, 3.9 with 10% ethanol, a d 2.1 on e85.
2012? Tuareg V6 TDI. Typically it gets30+? With the trailer it got roughly 11.
What really surprised me was how efficient the Yukon was with the trailer and how bad without. The change in the Silverado was shocking too, I never expected it to do so much worse, and was also shocked by how a little ethanol costs you more than the volume it replaces in efficiency. Theoretically the Silverado will go farther on 90 gallons of pure gas than it will on 100 gallons of 10% ethanol.
Confirms my experiences, where I’ve found that aero trumps weight every time. The aerodynamic match between tow vehicle, trailer, and load is especially important- Got 41 MPG with a Golf4 TDI hauling a Buell motorcycle on a 4 by 8 flatbed that neatly tucked behind the Golf. Same load on a Golf7 TDI with its more rounded rear dragged MPG down to 35. Switch loads to a BMW R80 and sidecar and MPG drops to 35 or so with the Golf4 and 30 with the Golf7. Boxier van, a Transit Connect, gets 25 MPG on E85 sans trailer and drops to 22 with a solo bike and 20 with a sidecar on the 4 by 8 flatbed. But put the same sidecar rig on a longer 6 by 12 trailer that requires securing the rig further back to avoid too much hitch weight and MPG took a nose dive and half the time it wouldn’t pull top gear on the flat!
I had the same trouble with my jeep grand cherokee the aero of a trailer that was within tow capacity just did not work for me.
ctrl+f hoovie
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Interesting. 😀
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen an Editor’s note comprised 1/3rd of the article!
My conclusion to all of this is trucks should be EREVs.
Also, Aging Wheels is an excellent channel.
His engineer was showing.
I really wanted to experience EV towing before I purchase something to tow my car so I jumped in with a friend and towed the race car on an open car hauler with a Rivian. What a nice tow vehicle, very stable, plenty of power, easy to maneuver. Got 1.8 mi/kwh on the 450 mile round trip in the flats of the midwest and staying on two lane lower speed roads.
But – I want to go further out with my car, I need an enclosed trailer, I already own a efficient electric car for commuting and stuff, disconnecting to charge. I would have to sell the EV runabout and drive the EV truck daily to pull it off. For the money I can keep the EV runabout and also own a truck for the half dozen hauls a year. And I’ve got the space to hoard cars…
How do you charge when towing? All the chargers I’ve seen aren’t pull-through – they’re just parking spaces with a cord. Do you have to unhitch the trailer first?
As of right now, there are roughly three choices.
The route from northern Illinois to Oshkosh, WI, had no pull-through stations. However, I did notice that Tesla Supercharger lots often had a single charger placed in a way that I could charge with the trailer connected without bothering anyone. That was my backup plan.
Huge fan of Aging Wheels and yeah, the towing video was super enlightening. Also, he might be the most creative editor in car media today, by far. We had him on Reels & Wheels when we did The Man From UNCLE because it had a Trabant in it. He’s a really good guy.
Can we expect more aerodynamic trailers in the future? If they paid as much attention to aero as the car manufacturers do, I’m sure they could crack this. Lower on the chassis, side skirts, wheel spats, etc.
Its really mostly about flow conditioning from the vehicle to the trailer (and slightly less so flow conditioning at the end of the trailer itself). This is going to be pretty different for all heights and profiles except in the case of 5th wheel-style hooks into boxy pickups, which have fairly standard heights and cross-sections in the back half. You absolutely could create a ludicrously more efficient skirted connection between most pickups and trailers in a consistent fashion. Hell slowly but surely, we are seeing it with Semis…
That’s a great point! To my knowledge, there are really only a couple of camper designs that try to clean up the air between the tow vehicle and the camper, but they also take a “one size fits all” approach, so it’s not perfect.
Oh yeah, so a 5th wheel or gooseneck should do a lot better aerodynamically. Maybe with spoilers?
Doesn’t the Tesla semi pull the trailer forward closer to the cab?
Some companies have been putting out more aerodynamic trailer designs! A teardrop is a classic aerodynamic camper design, and pop-ups also tend to be better than the mammoth campers that my parents like buying. Some companies have even been making camper designs that are supposedly optimized for towing behind EVs. Maybe I’ll get to test one of those one day.
Excellent article, and demonstrates what I have theorized about towing. What is interesting about towing with EVs is it is a situation where you can’t “efficiency” your way to good range while towing because the vehicle design has little to no influence over the added road load of the trailer. GM takes a lot of flack for having made the trucks inefficient and just shoving a huge battery in them, but a huge battery is really the only way to solve the range issue while towing for EVs.
The coupled flow between the vehicle and the trailer makes a huge difference, but that needs to be highly collaborative, and using a standard hitch and long toungue (which aids maneuvering) makes it hard unless you have giant louvred skirting ala buses.
But tbh, I think most people vastly vastly overstate how often long distance hauling occurs and how little design optimization should actually go into that as a result for passenger vehicles.
For vehicles that actually do consistent long distance hauling w/unpredictable aerodynamic loads (because you can optimize semis quite a bit with a fixed shape)… hybrid systems are just going to be unbeatable. Tbf, it could be turbine hybrid or whatever, but still.
This feels obvious to me after spending a week in a KOA campground and observing all the different trailers out there.
My little pop-up trailer took my minivan’s MPG down from ~28mpg average to ~20mpg at a reasonable 65-70mph, but was almost entirely shadowed by the van’s frontal area (though I do want to look at lowering it by a few inches for various reasons). That’s WAY less of a hit than I was expecting.
Comparing that to some of the 5th-wheel behemoths out there (where the frontal area of the combined load more than DOUBLES … yeah, I can bet that’s a big ol’ whack on your fuel economy.
I’ve had the same experience with my popup. Only reduces my mileage by about a quarter. It’s one of the many ways that I think a popup is superior to a hard-side trailer.
With all of this talk about range-depletion when towing, I’m starting to think that these pickup truck manufacturers are missing the boat… these should have been EREV’s. Maybe to fix that, they could sell generators that “snap in” to the bed and have another charging port in the bed for it to plug into. Put a 20-gal fuel tank right beside it and Bob’s your uncle.
Watched that episode yesterday.
Although they are small and will develop leaks, it makes the teardrop or pop up A-trailers a lot more desirable for my small family.
As opposed to the rest of the trailers that are large and will develop leaks? 😉
Hmm could just get a tent which has no impact on range, is much cheaper, and will develop leaks
Of course, but for longer, wetter stays, the trailer is nice, plus it has sinks, and bathrooms etc.
Last time I tried towing a car in a tent it fell apart within 1/4 miles and the sway was awful. Definitely recommend renting a uhaul trailer if you’re going any further than across your yard.
To be fair, some of them also come with preinstalled leaks from the factory.