Ford has made an electric pickup truck and it is available to buy now. Hold on, though, before you rush down to your local dealer and start demanding to get your order in, there are is a notable caveat here. Apart from anything else, the pickup in question is the Ford F-150 Lightning – the electrified version of America’s favourite truck and a model that we have never had go on sale in the UK.
This means that, short of a major U-turn, we’ll never get to see the Lightning in the UK officially and certainly not in right-hand drive.
However, there are plenty of reasons why the F-150 is a very important vehicle and one that bodes very well for the future of electrified commercial vehicles in the UK.
Why should I care about an electric Ford F-150 Lightning?
For many Americans, the F-150 is Ford. It’s part of the long-established F-series that is the best-selling vehicle in the US, full stop. Making a model of this magnitude electric-only at this stage of proceedings is a big step and one that will help allow Ford to get the message out to huge numbers of customers, potential and existing.
It’s also started making inroads, with more than 4,400 sold in the first four months of it going on sale and annual production targets of 150,000. Demand has been high enough that it is, at the time of writing, no longer available to order.
While we are highly unlikely to see this particular model in the UK, for reasons we’ll go into below, there are plenty of factors why we should welcome this.
For a start, it allows Ford to develop, showcase and test some very clever technology on a vehicle that is being bought and used.
But surely the Ford F-150’s really big and has a rubbish range?
The Ford F-150 is big – more on that later – but it also has a massive battery at its disposal. There is a standard-range version with 98kWh of useable energy and an extended range version with 131kWh. This translates to a standard range of 230 miles on the smaller battery and a whopping 320 miles on the larger one (although this dips to 300 if you go for the range-topping Platinum model with all its toys.)
They also come equipped with DC fast charging that means you can get from 15% to 80% charge in as little as 41 minutes, although it can take as long as 19 hours on a 32A connection.
It is definitely big, though. It is just over 5.9m long, 2.4m wide and just shy of 2m tall. This means it causes more than a few sucked-teeth moments, certainly around town and especially if you try and squeeze into the kind of spaces that have been allocated for charging in your local supermarket.
What is the Ford F-150 Lightning like to drive?
Despite its obvious bulk, this is a fantastically entertaining thing to drive. It has all of the best bits of electric motoring but amplified. Every time you think that it will be hampered by its size it defies every expectation and laughs at it.
It gets from 0-60mph in around four seconds, but this is only half the story. Put your foot down even only slightly to nip into a gap at a junction and it’ll have the tyres chirping as it scrabbles to get the power down. It’s so quiet generally speaking that you will hear all those little chirrups too, with a slight artificial ‘engine’ noise to speak of, but it’s not loud enough or bizarre enough to be irritating.
In fact, this thing is unbelievably fast for something so large. It offers immediate performance, whether you are starting from a standstill or while moving, and it is strong all the way up to motorway speeds. In fact, it is a totally alien sensation versus any pickup we’ve seen in the UK, even ones we consider quick like the V6 versions of the Mercedes-Benz X-Class or VW Amarok.
It even handles pretty tidily, keeping that huge weight and size in check if you throw it around corners. Sure, Ford probably could have given it a slightly softer ride but the payoff would have been something that cornered like a boat and it is still comfier than many more agricultural trucks that we get over here.
Visibility is generally decent, in that the windows are big and you can see lots out at your own level. However, you are up so high, and the bonnet is so far up that you will struggle to see smaller things lower down, such as obstacles out the front when you’re parking. The bits you can’t see will almost certainly be covered by the many cameras around the outside, and we certainly had to flick them on to be absolutely sure we weren’t going to drive over something. Yes, there are parking sensors, but the lack of visibility of low items is discombobulating.
What is the Ford F-150 like inside?
Take any jokes you might have written, heard or even thought about when it comes to American cars and the quality of their interiors and discard them. This thing has a glorious cabin, covered in the sort of materials that will have hill farmers laughing uproariously. This is not the interior of a working vehicle, as it is covered in the sort of soft-touch leathers and pliable plastics that are usually found on a high-end SUV.
It’s all pleasingly well screwed together, too, while the big screen that dominates the dash is an attractive and slick affair with nice graphics and all the usual connectivity features, wireless and otherwise.
So far so normal, what are all the clever features on the Ford F-150 Lightning?
What’s really exciting about the F-150 Lightning is all the extra stuff that you get, the sort of things that have been made possible by Ford’s thinking outside of the usual parameters, and the sort of things that have come about because this is a dedicated vehicle, built to be clever from the start.
The one that we were most excited by is a fairly simple one – the front boot, or because this is an American car the front trunk, or frunk if you like. It’s huge – at 400 litres it is bigger than the boot in a Ford Focus hatchback. It’s also got a luggage net, and an underfloor storage space that is perfect for the charging cable, which means it is right to hand when you plug in, given the charging port is on the front wing.
There are also four power sockets, a couple of USB chargers and that lower section has a drainable floor so you can either plug tools/laptops in, or park it up to hold a load of drinks for your evening BBQ or similar.
It’s also got a powered opening, which is held up by a hydraulic strut. It’s a simple thing, but it is so rare and welcome to have somewhere to stash something out of sight in a pickup truck without having to revert to a loadbay cover.
What about the Ford F-150’s loading bay?
There are more clever features at the other end, too, where the loading bay has the sort of details that have had some thought put into them.
There are multiple plug sockets here (all US spec, sadly) but these are more powerful than the ones in the frunk and allows you to connect proper tools, with 7.2Kw through these outlets.
As well as being a tool station, the F-150’s tailgate can turn into a workbench. It comes with measurements (in both cm and inches) and places to attach brackets to secure whatever you are working on. The F-150’s hefty height has been accounted for too, with an in-built step and handle to help you clamber into the loading space.
We’d question how well all this would stand up to the rigours of life on, say, a building site, but then the same can be said of the plush interior with its light colours.
For all the Ford’s bulk and strength, it isn’t rated to carry much in the way of weight. On the extended-battery version you only get a payload of 885kg, which is lower than every pickup in the UK bar the Ford Ranger Raptor and would not even qualify it for the commercial vehicle status that brings various tax breaks. Thankfully this goes up to 1,014kg in the standard version with the smaller battery.
To make sure you get the most out of this payload, or to make sure you don’t go flying past it, there is even a built-in set of scales. This is a similar idea to the overload sensor that was once offered on the small Stellantis vans, but this goes further by giving you an estimate of what sort of an impact it will have on your range.
What else is there in the F-150’s cabin?
If the leather and big screen didn’t make it clear that the F-150 is aimed more at management than manual labourer, then the various other tricks in the interior will hammer it further home. The cleverest one is the feature that allows you to fold the gear lever flat and then flip a piece of trim over to create a desk. Again, more geared towards office workers than labourers.
There’s also a handy space under the rear seats, a spacious glovebox and yet more plug sockets of various types. It feels clever, well thought through and genuinely futuristic.
What does the Ford F-150 mean for UK buyers?
We’re never going to get the F-150 Lightning over in the UK. However well it disguises its size on the move it is simply too big for our roads and parking spaces. More than one of us had a moment where we feared for the wing mirrors, such is its width and it would leave you hunting for the most isolated parking space in the supermarket so you don’t block others in. Not easy when you need to plug it in from time to time…
However, it’s an excellent example of what you can do with an electric vehicle can do if you concentrate on what it can be rather than holding things back to maximise range. It is an inspired, and even inspiring, thing and makes the F-150 one of the most exciting vehicles we have driven for some time.
This all bodes well for the new Ford Ranger, which has been confirmed as being designed with electric in mind. If an EV Ranger is even a scaled back version of the F-150 Lightning then it should be an excellent thing.
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