That’s too bad, I love my lightning. I spend about $20/month on home charging, love the acceleration and it’s good enough to haul all the things I need for my small farm. Also, it’s great for long distance recreational drives (from a very specific perspective)- I like driving 250-300 miles in a day and then parking at an RV spot for the night instead of a hotel room. I can run the heat and AC all night as well as hav…
I would've loved to get a lightning when we replaced the farm truck this year. If would've been great to be able to charge it while our solar array was pumping out power. But the price on those things is eye wateringly high. We got a gas f150 for about half the price of the lightning. I'm not sure who they were trying to sell those to, to be honest.
Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
141–150 of 915 posts
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#142I expected the "T word" to come out in the article, however this fails to address any of the practical reasons it isn't a good replacement for the value-engineered F-150: * The price isn't right for small businesses. These trucks are quite expensive * They're difficult to repair. A regular F-150 is designed to be repaired; these things are designed like iPhones to be disposable. * Parts availability is scarce, contra…
I guess we will find out if many of these things actually matter with the Slate truck. It is in many ways the antithesis of this electric F-150. If that vehicle fails then there are no more excuses, a significant chunk of Americans just don't like electric vehicles and are destined to be laggards.
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#143From Ford... Ford Follows Customers to Drive Profitable Growth; Reinvests in Trucks, Hybrids, Affordable EVs, Battery Storage; Takes EV-Related Charges https://www.fromtheroad.ford.com/us/en/articles/2025/ford-re... >As part of this plan, Ford’s next-generation F-150 Lightning will shift to an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) architecture and be assembled at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michig…
Okay are we just saying they just discontinued one electric F150 in favor of another? Meh. Edit: Oh, an EREV is fancy way to say "hybrid" ok
I literally couldn’t think of a better truck than an EREV. Give me an ICE engine that can haul my trailer into the boondocks knowing I just need a gas station nearby, but can power my trailer off the battery.
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The price isn't right for small businesses. These trucks are quite expensive So are RAM trucks and I don't think they're hurting for customers. I think there are two fundamental issues. One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US - i.e., if you're progressive, you're supposed to hate them and see them as the symbol of the gun-totting macho redneck culture, and if you're conservative, yo…
> One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US Based on my personal experience traveling, there's a more practical reason for the political divide. I spend a good portion of my life in rural parts of the US these days, where most of the residents are pretty conservative. But these are also parts of the country where I get nervous when I'm on 1/4 tank of gas. If you're routinely out in plac…
At 100 miles of range, you only have a couple of blank spots.
With third party chargers, there's really only one blank spot in Montana. At this point, the range is already a solved problem.
Earlier this year, I did experiments with placing stations manually on the map and using the US road networks to calculate the isolines. With just about 70 more stations, you can make any point on the public road network in the entire contiguous US lie within 50 miles of the nearest charger.
So the charging availability is likely going to be solved completely even during the current shitty admin.
> It's not just about being 50 miles from a gas station, it's about the time it takes to charge on top of that.
At 325kW charge rate (common on recent chargers), you're looking for maybe 20 minutes to get enough charge to reach your destination.
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#145I am actually surprised they cancelled the F150 Lightning, I see a lot of them the Metro Vancouver area where a lot of contractors, (gardeners, pool maintenance, labourers, etc...) are driving them as electricity is super cheap here and gasoline is quite expensive.
Yeah, not everyone has that arrangement though. I was shocked (shocked!) when I realized that for my plug-in hybrid van, running it on gas can be cheaper than charging it, depending on the time of day and time of year.
Where I live, peak hours electricity is $0.22/KWh in the summertime during peak hours, or $0.18/KWh off-peak. My van gets ~32 MPG on its tank, but also ~32 miles on a 16KWh charge. So it’s easy math, 1 gallon = 16KWh, so $0.22 * 16 = $3.52, so gas has to be more expensive than that to be worth it. Off-peak it’s $0.18 * 16 = $2.88, which makes it barely worth it to charge, with gas prices near me being close to $3/gallon.
(I have since bought solar panels and now it’s basically free to charge my car, but I can totally understand why electric vehicles just don’t work out cost-wise for a lot of people, even when accounting for ongoing fuel costs…)
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty much dead on. I live in a rural part of the US and there are tons of old, worked-on trucks. The idea that there might be an all-electric f150 hanging out in 40 years is, frankly, laughable. I know a lot of city kids think trucks are some obnoxious luxury good, but they're basically a functional requirement in most of the (very large) country.
Less than 20% of Americans live in most of the (very large) country. The rest live in cities and suburbs.
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than 20% of Americans live in most of the (very large) country. The rest live in cities and suburbs.
And how do you think vehicle ownership compares between those two groups?
Which is why new pickup truck models are so often not fit-for-purpose as a working truck of any kind. Like an EV F-150.
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly sounds more like a regulation problem to me. So many companies will not prioritize serviceability unless mandated by law.
> companies will not prioritize serviceability unless mandated by law Ford is “expected to take about $19.5 billion in charges, mainly tied to its electric-vehicle business” [1]. If serviceability was the problem, that sounds like a solid incentive to get it right. [1] https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-takes-19-5-billion-c...
The way I see it is if there was sufficient enforcement of regulations around spare parts and serviceability then there's no way Ford could have stood up a factory that spat out a bunch of electric trucks without also producing a bunch of spare parts so the unreasonable delay to end users trying to repair their vehicles didn't occur.
I don't have to worry about getting a car battery or sparkplug because these things are standardized and mass produced. That's due to regulation.
The regulations just don't go far enough and the enforcement of them is obviously lax in 21st entury America
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean the biggest issue is that “trucks” like F-150 are actually used because of US tax system that exempts such massive vehicles from emmision taxes because they are work trucks. They are pretty ineffective work vehicles but some people just love them as a symbol. That symbolism goes completely against electric/green vehicles. In other words - people who buy F-150 would never buy electric vehicle and people who are…
Ford actually makes a highly practical electric work vehicle. It's called E-Transit.
Re: Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's still simpler, actually. IME the most complicated part of an ICE vehicle is the power delivery system. Transmissions are nightmares to work on. Making that all-electric and just using an engine to generate power significantly simplifies the system. I'm not a mechanic though, so take my word with a grain of salt.
My understanding is that going to hybrid actually allowed Toyota to significantly simplify their transmissions relative to ICE vehicles, even without going full EV.