There's a conversation happening in the truck world right now that a lot of people are dancing around, and it goes something like this: electric trucks look impressive on paper, but when it comes time to actually put them to work, the numbers start falling apart fast. Nowhere is that more obvious than when you hook up a trailer or throw a heavy load in the bed.
For anyone who spends weekends hauling equipment — whether that's a pair of dirt bikes, a full-size UTV, a snowmobile, or a boat — towing and payload capacity aren't just specs on a sticker. They're the whole point of owning a truck. And right now, the electric truck market has a serious problem meeting that standard.
The Range Extender Was Supposed to Be Different
When Scout Motors came back onto the scene — revived as a brand with backing from Volkswagen — a lot of people paid attention. The name carried weight, and the promise of a range-extended electric truck and SUV felt like it could actually address the biggest complaint about EV trucks in real-world use.
The idea behind a range extender is straightforward. Instead of relying entirely on a battery pack that drains quickly under load, a small onboard engine runs as a generator to keep the batteries charged. In theory, that should mean you don't have to choose between towing capacity and range. You could pull a trailer without watching the battery gauge drop to zero somewhere in the middle of Nevada.
The two models in question are the Scout Terra, a pickup truck, and the Traveler, an SUV. Both were set to offer a range extender option alongside a pure battery electric version. That setup gave a lot of people hope that Scout was building something genuinely different from what Ford, GMC, and Rivian had already put on the market.
Then the CEO Opened His Mouth
Speaking with Jay Leno last year, Scout CEO Scott Keough let something slip that sent shockwaves through the truck community. According to reporting from The Drive, Keough told Leno that the range extender versions of the Terra and Traveler would actually have half the towing capacity of the pure electric versions.
Half.
The straight battery electric models were being rated at around 10,000 pounds of towing capacity. The range extender versions? Somewhere around 5,000 pounds. For context, 5,000 pounds covers a small camper or a lightweight boat on a good day. It does not cover serious work truck territory, and it certainly doesn't cover the kind of hauling that people who were interested in Scout's range extender were planning to do.
The internet, as it tends to do, had a strong reaction. And not a positive one.
Scout Completely Misread Its Own Customer Base
Here's where things get interesting, and honestly, a little embarrassing for the company. For a long stretch of time, Scout Motors operated under the assumption that most buyers would choose the pure electric version over the range extender. They thought the BEV crowd would dominate their pre-order numbers, with only a smaller segment opting for the generator-equipped models.
They were wrong. Very wrong.
When the actual pre-order data came in, the split looked nothing like what the company expected. Rather than a modest portion of buyers choosing the range extender, the numbers came back closer to 85 percent in favor of the range extender versus just 15 percent for the pure BEV. That is not a rounding error. That is a company fundamentally misunderstanding why its potential customers were interested in its product in the first place.
People who want a Scout truck are not the same people who are buying an electric sedan for a daily commute. They are people who go places, pull things, carry things, and put serious demands on their vehicles. They liked the idea of a range extender precisely because they do not trust a pure battery electric truck to handle those demands over long distances.
Now They Say They're Working On It
To his credit, Keough has acknowledged the backlash and suggested that solutions are being explored. At an industry event, he addressed the towing capacity criticism directly, saying, "I think we have the tool kit without a doubt," and adding, "And we've got some solutions on that front, nothing I'm announcing now."
That's a carefully worded statement. It's confident enough to keep buyers from walking away, but vague enough to commit to exactly nothing. And the bigger question hanging over that statement is a practical one: how do you redesign the towing capacity of a vehicle when you're already deep into the engineering and development process?
Building a truck isn't like updating software. The structural components, the frame design, the powertrain layout — these decisions get locked in early and changing them late in the game costs time and money. Whatever solutions Scout's engineers are working on, they're operating under real constraints.
The Broader Problem With EV Trucks and Towing
Set Scout aside for a moment and look at the larger picture, because this isn't a Scout-specific problem. It's an industry-wide one.
Every electric truck on the market right now takes a significant hit to range when towing or carrying heavy loads. The physics are straightforward and they're not going away anytime soon. Batteries lose energy faster under load. Additional weight means the drivetrain has to work harder. Aerodynamic drag from a trailer or a loaded bed compounds that drain further. Put all of that together and what looks like an impressive range figure on the spec sheet can get cut dramatically once a trailer hitch gets involved.
The 10,000-pound towing figure for the Scout BEV sounds respectable. But 10,000 pounds means nothing if pulling that weight cuts your range in half and leaves you hunting for a charger every hundred miles on a cross-country haul. Real truck people know this already, which is exactly why so many of them were drawn to the range extender option in the first place.
One writer who tested a Rivian on a towing trip described the experience as failing spectacularly, which sums up a feeling that a lot of EV truck owners have run into when they try to use their vehicles the way a truck is supposed to be used.
What Would Actually Fix This
The honest answer is that battery technology needs to improve before electric trucks can genuinely compete with gas and diesel in demanding towing applications. Current battery chemistry simply isn't dense enough to store the kind of energy needed for heavy hauling without requiring enormous and heavy battery packs that create their own problems.
That's not a knock on the engineers working on these vehicles. It's a statement of where the technology stands right now, in early 2026, and it applies across the entire industry. The range extender concept was appealing precisely because it acknowledged that limitation and tried to work around it. A small gasoline or diesel engine acting as a generator doesn't need to be powerful. It just needs to keep the batteries topped up enough that range anxiety disappears.
The failure of Scout's range extender towing numbers is frustrating because it suggests the compromise wasn't handled carefully enough. Adding a generator but cutting towing capacity in half doesn't solve the problem. It creates a different one.
Where Scout Goes From Here
Scout still has time to make adjustments before these vehicles reach buyers. The pre-order numbers tell a clear story about who their customer is and what that customer needs. The 85/15 split between range extender and BEV buyers is data that cannot be ignored, and to Keough's credit, it sounds like the company isn't ignoring it.
But announcements of working on solutions and actual solutions are different things. The truck community has seen plenty of promises from automakers over the last several years that didn't pan out exactly as advertised. Scout is going to need to show the math eventually, not just hint at having a toolkit.
For the people who work their trucks hard — who need to move a trailer across three states, haul equipment into rough terrain, or pull something heavy up a mountain pass — the standards are clear. Whatever solution Scout announces, it needs to hold up under load, over distance, in the real world. Not just on a test track or in a press release.
The revival of the Scout name generated genuine excitement. The brand's heritage, combined with the backing of a major automaker and a product lineup that seemed to understand outdoor and work-truck buyers, gave a lot of people a reason to pay attention. That goodwill is still there, but it's being tested.
The Bottom Line
Electric trucks are getting better. That much is undeniable. But better is a relative term, and for anyone who genuinely depends on a truck to move heavy things over long distances, better isn't the same as good enough yet.
Scout Motors' range extender was a smart concept in principle. A truck that could handle range anxiety while still delivering the torque and capability electric motors are known for sounded like the right answer for the market Scout was targeting. The execution, so far, has come up short. Half the towing capacity of the BEV version is not a selling point. It's a problem.
The good news is that Scout knows it's a problem, their engineers are apparently on it, and the pre-order data has made the customer expectations crystal clear. The question now is whether they can actually deliver something that makes sense for the buyers who are counting on them, or whether this becomes another chapter in the long story of electric trucks that look better on paper than they perform in practice.
