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Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, there was an exclusive report that Ford is seriously considering killing the F-150 Lightning altogether. Production has already been halted due to aluminum sourcing, but the EV pickup truck might have its plug pulled for good.
For the record: The F-150 Lightning is the best electric pickup truck I’ve driven, and I also believe it’s the best F-150 you can buy. For most people, most of the time, the Lightning is the perfect truck, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
That being said, the Lightning has had a tough go at things. The original base truck was to start at $40,000. The dual motor, standard range variant came with all the features anyone really needs in a truck, at a price that undercuts the competition and even provides more value than a similarly-equipped gas-powered F-150.
Of course, the price didn’t stay that way for long. The pricing uncertainty led to some speculation about Ford’s commitment to affordable EVs, but the massive investment in the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center — a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility — and positive messaging indicated that Ford was in it for the long haul.
A lot of things have happened between then and now. There was a massive, coordinated effort in the media to politicize the EV powertrain and to make it a talking point. Electric vehicles were simply too “woke” for Americans, and that unless we all kept purchasing gas-guzzling vehicles, America would cease to exist.
Which is funny, because America’s soft power in the world has diminished extensively, and EVs have had nothing to do with that. But I digress.
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A few weeks ago, Ford finally launched its integrated energy solution for home users that would allow people to arbitrage with their power companies, saving $500 or more on electricity bills while helping to stabilize the power grid. The only Ford EV (and they only have two, mind you) capable of that is the F-150 Lightning.
Which might be dead.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Lightning is dead. Ford has been considerably scaling back its EV growth plans. This started long before Trump took office, but the president’s war on renewable energy and acknowledging climate change has seemed to accelerate the scaling back.
The regular F-150 has received an update. The Lightning has not. The T3 truck was under development until it wasn’t. The Mach-E has received some small updates, but I’m not sure I’d consider them big enough to be called a mid-cycle refresh (though Ford might disagree). Now, the Lightning might be completely on the chopping block.
Ford’s CEO Jim Farley seems to be placing any EV bet left on the $30,000 truck thing that they are working on.
💡Do you have information about Ford’s plans for the Lightning? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me on Signal at chadkirchner.1701, or with another secure communication method.
Since the original announcement that it’s happening, we haven’t seen any more information or movement on that front. Of course, you don’t want to show a product so far away from the actual on-sale date that people forget about it. You also don’t want to have to stage a years-long marketing plan to keep people hyped and interested.
Ford felt like they had to show something, I’m sure, once Slate started making news with its upcoming pickup truck, but now it’s all quiet at Ford headquarters, and we’re unlikely to see anything for a while.
What concerns me about the product, which we’ve all decided to call Ranchero in the interim, is that with the pullback on all other EV plans and projects, we really don’t know how committed Farley is to seeing this product actually go on sale to customers anywhere near the price the company is promising.
Ford needs to prove that it’s committed to EVs all over again, because the company squandered any real lead it had when the Mach-E hit the marketplace. The only way I see that happening now is delivering on the Ranchero (or whatever it ends up being called) at a price close to the $30,000 it’s promising.
The Maverick was a great deal at $20,000. But now the starting price is nearly $30,000, which makes it not as great of a deal. Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be able to bullshit his way into a $1 trillion payout, building a house of cards that might be too big to fail, but the rest of the automotive industry most certainly can not.
Ford might not be ready to show its cheap truck to everyone, but a traditional product rollout isn’t the correct play here, either. Like Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files, I want to believe, but I’m going to need some signs of life, and I think that while it doesn’t need to happen right now, it’ll need to happen sooner than later.