As new electric vehicles go, the BrightDrop Zevo 600 is pretty spartan. It has a full suite of the latest driver safety aids and a Google-powered infotainment system, but you can see its bare metal skin if you look at the door from the driver’s seat, and the innate silence of its electric powertrain is offset by the always – Present ringing and thumping of the rear roller door. But that’s okay, because the Zevo 600 is a commercial vehicle, and that means reliability, efficiency and safety is more important than the last word in sophistication.
We have been following the development of BrightDrop for a while. The startup first broke coverage at the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show with an announcement by Mary Barra of General Motors during her keynote address at the conference. Leveraging GM’s new platform of batteries and electric motors, BrightDrop raced the new Hummer EV to be the fastest-developed vehicle in GM’s history in just 20 months.
As in the Hummer EV, you’ll find a double-stacked slab of lithium-ion cells between the wheelbase of the Zevo 600. In this case, there are 20 modules (versus 24 in the Hummer, or just 12 in the upcoming Cadillac Lyric SUV), which is plenty. is for a range of at least 402 km. And to prove it, the van ran on a single charge from New York City to Washington, DC on Thursday.
BrightDrop
FedEx is BrightDrop’s first customer, and the EV is designed to drop into its fleet operations in California relatively painlessly. That’s why the gas card was chosen to almost perfectly mimic the 230 hp (171 kW) diesel you might find in one of FedEx’s conventional trucks. It’s not fast, but it’s not meant to be.
Built from the same toolkit as GM’s other new EVs, the Zevo 600 has access to the same components and subsystems. For example, it features a range of the latest safety-oriented advanced driver assistance systems. It even has the electronic architecture to support Super Cruise, should anyone ever come up with a business case to make that worthwhile.
While the Zevo 600 is configured as a FedEx work vehicle, it’s not quite barebones despite its bare doors. The latest Android Automotive infotainment stack means Google’s voice assistant is on board and waiting to help, and there are USB-A and USB-C ports, as well as a pair of 120V AC sockets. And the van is more than roomy – the door to the cargo area is particularly wide.
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It’s a big van, but it shrinks around the driver.
Jonathan Gitlin
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This particular van was not fitted with shelves.
Jonathan Gitlin
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The van is easy to get in and out of, with integrated handles and robust buttons to lock or unlock the rear door.
Jonathan Gitlin
On a short ride, the Zevo 600 was easy to put on the road despite its size. The composite side mirrors work well, and downtown DC looked positively cinematic as it was framed by the wraparound windshield. With the drive selector in the lower range, throttle mapping for one-pedal driving was judged perfectly, and steering was light, revealing an impressively tight turning circle.
My ride was too short to get a first-hand understanding of the Zevo 600’s power consumption, but the trip odometer showed a respectable 1.8 miles/kWh over 348 miles (560 km), and at least 260 of those miles were on highway speed rather than the low-speed crawling that EVs are so good at. As with the Ford e-Transit I drove in January, it’s quite a rowdy driving experience, especially since vans like these are big empty boxes on wheels and don’t have the sound deadening and interior trim that silences all that hassle in passenger cars.
Since it’s a popular question every time we look at electric vans, I asked BrightDrop about possible private sales – imagine a modern GMC motorhome – but that will probably have to wait patiently for the first Zevo 600s to start their second life after their working days are done. For now, BrightDrop has plenty of vans to build for fleet customers like FedEx and Walmart.
