For General Motors, the GMC Hummer EV is a bit of old news. The General was producing electric trucks more than a century ago.

It’s true. There’s seldom anything truly new under the sun, and that applies in the auto industry just like everywhere else. The Hummer EV,  GMC’s 9,000-lb battery-electric pickup introduced in 2021, has certainly caught the attention of the automotive community and the public at large, but electric trucks are nothing new at General Motors. The company first offered them more than a century ago.

GM actually inherited its first electric truck line when in 1909 it acquired the Rapid Motor Truck Co. of Pontiac, Michigan, founded in 1902 by Max and Morris Grabowski. Rapid produced a complete line of both gasoline and electric trucks, and when GM consolidated its truck operations into one organization in 1911, they were rebranded under the GMC name. The Grabowski name is the basis for the Motor City legend that the letters GMC originally stood for Grabowski Motor Company.

Designed by John M. Lansden, an EV pioneer, the Rapid/GMC trucks ranged from one-half ton to six tons in capacity, using DC motors of various ratings mounted in the center of the chassis, dual chain drive, and solid rubber tires. A wooden battery compartment was located below and behind the driver’s seat, where either standard lead-acid or Edison nickel-iron batteries could be installed—Lansden was an associate of Thomas Edison.

GMC built around 500 electric trucks between 1912 and 1916, in what turned out to be an ever-shrinking portion of the truck division’s total production volume. As gasoline engines continued to improve the demand for battery-powered commercial vehicles dried up, and at the end of ’16, the GMC electric truck line was dropped.