It was so freakin' heavy.
From Observer, December 18
Once billed as the future of Ford trucks, the F-150 Lightning fell short on sales, margins and timing.
At its launch in 2022, Ford promoted the Lightning with a video showing a prototype pulling a one-million-pound train. In practice, the truck is rated to tow up to 10,000 pounds when properly equipped, but doing so cuts its range roughly in half, from about 320 miles to 160 miles. The commercial “raised expectations of what they could do, and when people realized how much range is impacted by towing a large trailer, they were really disappointed,” Sam Abuelsamid, an automotive analyst and Vice President of Market Research at Telemetry, told Observer.
Abuelsamid noted that gasoline-powered trucks face similar range penalties while towing. “The Lightning is actually better than the gas version of the F-150 in pretty much every other way.”
Still, sales never matched Ford’s ambitions. The automaker had expected to sell 40,000 to 150,000 units a year, but even at its peak in 2024, it sold just 33,5100 units. By contrast, the gas-powered F-150 continues to sell hundreds of thousands of units annually.....
....MUCH MORE
December 2022 - Electric Vehicle Prices Gone Wild: "The Cheapest Ford F-150 Lightning Pro Sees Another Price Increase to Nearly Sixty Grand" (F)
It's not just the financing costs as Mr. Musk points out in the post immediately below.
The combination of historically high general inflation, extraordinary price increases for lithium and higher input costs (labor, electricity) for manufacturing means trouble for the mass roll-out of EV's.
You will own nothing and enjoy walking....
February 2023 - "Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning weighs 6,500 pounds, at least one-third more than the gasoline version" (F)
November 2024 - "Ford to Halt F-150 Lightning Production as EV Demand Wanes" (F; TSLA)
For folks who don't follow this stuff obsessively the key takeaway is: It is hard to manufacture electric vehicles profitably....
Possibly related: "British parking association: weight of electric cars causes collapse of parking garages"
The electric F-150 is an interesting story, Ford is obviously aware of some of its problems:
How to power your house with the 2021 Ford F-150 hybrid generator
Electric Vehicle Prices Gone Wild: "The Cheapest Ford F-150 Lightning
It's not just the financing costs as Mr. Musk points out in the post immediately below.
The combination of historically high general inflation, extraordinary price increases for lithium and higher input costs (labor, electricity) for manufacturing means trouble for the mass roll-out of EV's. You will own nothing and enjoy walking....
And finally, circling back to MotorTrend and the Ford Lightning, they had another article on just how much juice you suck up doing truck stuff like towing:
Here's a rather stunning energy density factoid from MotorTrend:
...Before you hitch an Airstream to your electric truck and set out to circumnavigate the country, you need to understand this: With the largest available battery pack, a fully charged 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck has less energy onboard than a regular F-150 with four gallons of gas in its tank...That was in July 2022. Despite the handicap MotorTrend just named the Lightning their [2022]Truck of the Year.
