![]() ![]() The factory that builds the Lightning, the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, is temporarily closed to complete final plant upgrades to triple its annual production run rate to a targeted 150,000 Lightning trucks beginning this fall. "Ford is taking advantage of increased plant capacity, continued work on scaling production and cost, and improving battery raw material costs," Ford said in its news release. The price of the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning is being slashed dramatically and effective immediately, Ford Motor Co. ![]() “This is a starting point,” he says.View Gallery: F-150 Lightning plant in Dearborn unlike anything Ford has built in 118 years “Some people use it to go buy milk at a supermarket, some people take it on long off-road trips, and some people use it for work.” An electric pickup can’t be a pickup for everyone, he says, and more traditional buyers won’t necessarily cotton to a new technology right away. It’s “a Swiss Army knife kind of vehicle,” says Gil Tal, who studies travel behavior at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. If this truck is going to be a success, its power-generating features will need to appeal to people who use it for work. Research conducted by the consulting firm BCG (and funded by Ford) found that, of the 17 million F-series trucks on US roads today, between one-quarter and one-third are used for commercial purposes. The truck also has a remarkably spacious “frunk”-that is, front trunk, the space where an internal-combustion engine would go on a gas-powered vehicle-which drivers can use to store valuables they’re not comfortable leaving in the bed. The truck’s more expensive versions come with 11 AC outlets, a nice perk if you want to plug in power tools while on the road. During the rollout event, CEO Jim Farley cited recent ice storms in Texas, which have been blamed in part on climate change and which stunted the state's electric grid for five days, as a reason to pony up for the Lightning.įord added some practical touches to broaden the appeal. Potential users will likely have to pay to install a home integration system, price to be determined. ![]() It will be the first electric vehicle, the company says, to serve as a “battery on wheels.” Ford says the extended battery in the more expensive version of the electric F-150 will be able to power a blacked-out home for three days. So it’s likely no accident that the vehicle’s first bit of marketing touches, however obliquely, on surviving a climate-changed Earth. This truck, he said, “will fulfill our promise to our children and our grandchildren that our generation is committed to leaving them a cleaner planet.” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman, cast the event in historic terms, calling it “a watershed moment for our industry.” The 64-year-old executive got a bit reflective too. Ford on Wednesday unveiled the F-150 Lightning, a relatively inexpensive electric version of the most popular vehicle in America. Despite his role as the mascot for zero-emission vehicles, Musk is not always sanguine about humanity’s future on Earth-hence all the Mars stuff-so the truck’s unorthodox design made some sense.īut the real EV of dystopia may be a new pickup. The look was, as one industrial designer told WIRED at the time, “anti-humanistic,” a ride devised, seemingly, for a Mad Max future. When Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to a stage in 2019 to unveil the company’s all-electric Cybertruck pickup, observers were shocked, and that's putting it mildly. ![]()
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