Will pickup-truck buyers go electric?

Pickup trucks comprise the last U.S. light-duty vehicle segment to produce modern electric vehicle offerings, and they face unique challenges in engineering, economics, and consumer acceptance. We conduct a discrete choice experiment with 534 U.S. pickup-truck buyers to estimate their likelihood of choosing electric pickup trucks and their willingness to pay for vehicle attributes. We find a large majority (74%) of pickup truck buyers belong to latent classes that prefer electric trucks or are indifferent between electric and gasoline trucks when they have identical price, range, towing and payload capacity. However, 26% are strongly opposed. With today's technology, price and range are the largest barriers to increased adoption for most pickup truck buyers. Our simulations suggest that if electric pickup trucks successfully meet National Academies' 2030 cost and range projections and are as widely available as conventional pickup trucks, the majority of new U.S. pickup truck sales could be electric.