Electric Pickup Truck History

The history of the automobile actually has an early electric slant to it, but this is less true of pickup trucks.  In fact, it is perhaps safe to say that the electric cars of the early day were built for cheapness rather than power, something that is not at all what the pickup truck is all about.  For that reason, pickup trucks have historically been combustion-based for the extra power such technology afforded them at the time.  In order to see some electricity start to pop into the pickup truck industry, you really need to take a look at the decade just before the turn of the most recent century.

In 1990, some efforts at the creation of an electric pickup truck started happening on multiple fronts because of a number of pieces of legislation passed by the US Government.  Even some supporting state agencies such as the California Air Resources Board started to hop onto the electricity bandwagon and for that reason many of the electric pickup trucks of today actually owe their creation to this period in time.  Progress was slow in light of the very cheap gasoline that was still available at that time however, so not that many models came off the shelves.

Fast forward to the present day and what you see is that the high price of oil more than anything else is driving innovation in electric pickup trucks.  This is true for just about every other area of transportation as well, which is why one can be hopeful that some great models are on their way.