At this point, coverage of the electric pickup truck market has taken on something of a funereal vibe. It's clear that electric trucks aren't taking off at the rates that car companies once projected, and since a lot of those companies—especially here in America—live and die by truck sales, that doesn't bode well for the future.
The shortcomings of EV trucks are obvious at this point. Want range, efficiency, towing power and a small battery? Pick maybe two of those things. Forget low costs entirely—not that cheap trucks are easy to find these days. The problem is that the American model of a giant, expensive truck capable of towing the moon itself doesn't really track with battery power, and long-term, that means car companies need to figure out some alternative solutions.
But I'm also choosing to be optimistic here, and that's because EVs can also bring unprecedented advantages that the market has barely seen yet. One of them is packaging. Without an engine and a transmission tunnel to account for, car designers can unlock a ton of new form factors. And the GMC Sierra EV has a feature that proves this.
Now, every time I drive an electric truck, I have to ask this: Where's the midgate?
(Full Disclosure: GMC sent me a fully-charged Sierra EV to test for a week.)
When I first drove GMC's take on the electric truck last year, I was generally impressed. It seemed to be everything the Tesla Cybertruck was supposed to be but ultimately wasn't: long-range, towing- and off-road capable, and convincingly premium. I liked it much better than its sibling, the Chevrolet Silverado EV. The two are similarly priced, but the GMC's interior far surpasses the Chevy's lifted-from-an-Equinox vibe.
At the same time, it shares the same shortcomings. Both trucks pack huge batteries, rated between about 170 kilowatt-hours and 205 kWh. That's roughly between two and three times the battery pack you'd find in a Tesla Model Y. It means a lot of range, like a 450-mile rating for this Sierra EV AT4 Max Range that I tested.
It also means long charging times—I was quoted about 18 hours to go from a 40% charge to a 100% full battery on my home ChargePoint plug. (To its credit, it did this in a little under 16, but that's still a lot.) Then you have the environmental concerns about a battery that big, or how that means it weighs in at nearly 9,000 pounds. And, perhaps owing to its shared DNA with the new Hummer, the thing is just massive, ending wider and taller than its gas-truck counterparts.
But both have a party trick I love in the form of the Multi-Pro Midgate. Basically, the wall separating the rear passengers from the truck bed can fold down, extending the bed even further. The rear window can even be removed temporarily and folded into that mechanism as well, opening the entire cabin up for extra bed storage—up to 10 feet and 10 inches of total bed space. Here's a quick refresher on how it works:
I need to be clear that this is not a new idea. It's not even a new General Motors idea. The old Chevrolet Avalanche and Cadillac Escalade EXT did this too, perhaps most famously. The Subaru Baja did it in a more limited way. Midgates have been featured on a lot of pickup truck concepts since then, but rarely put into production vehicles.
So this isn't necessarily an EV-exclusive feature. But as GM's engineers told me last year, having fewer mechanical parts does make this sort of feature easier to implement. (Toyota even showed off an EV truck concept that had the same feature back in 2023, and I'd love to see them get around to actually making it.)
The midgate was remarkably useful for doing the kind of important, manly truck stuff I needed the Sierra EV to do: help me haul a bunch of leftover crap from various home renovation projects to the dump.
Some of these items would've needed to be chopped up or broken apart if I didn't want them hanging out the back of the truck with the tailgate down. But with the midgate, I could fit all this detritus neatly in the bed, with the tailgate securely up. The Sierra EV opens a whole world of in-cabin hauling space this way.
I'd later haul a queen-size mattress out of a storage unit, and it too fit perfectly in the truck bed with the help of the midgate. I didn't even remove was the horizontal bar for the fold-out tonneau cover, because that was a socket-wrench job and I was too lazy to bother. I hauled the mattress without even dropping the rear window.
It's nice to see this feature make a comeback. And it could certainly be done on more EVs. When the battery is also a structural element of the vehicle, and there's no traditional transmission or exhaust system to get in the way, we could see this catch on across the segment. It's a bit like the Rivian R1T's Gear Tunnel, another EV truck feature I love. While it's been delayed, it looks like Ram's first-ever all-electric truck, the Ram 1500 REV, will offer this too, whenever it graces our presence.
Is the Sierra EV's midgate enough to make up for its other shortcomings? The downsides are what they are, but even I can't deny it's a supremely capable truck. And one way or another, I hope this opens up more clever packaging choices for tomorrow's electric trucks. Once you try the midgate, you won't want to go back.
Gallery: 2026 GMC Sierra EV AT4 Max Range
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
