![]() ![]() But that’s about to change.įord has announced a deal that will allow its electric vehicles access to 12,000 Tesla superchargers nationwide via an adapter, meaning you can fully charge your vehicle in under an hour. At that rate, it would have taken me 14 hours to fully charge the vehicle.Įven for a vehicle as uniformly superb as the F-150 Lightning, infrastructure is still clearly an annoyance at best, and a big problem at worst. I returned to the office-park charging station, where I sat for another hour and added another 10 to 12 miles of range. Not wanting to drain the battery further before Ford came to pick up the car, I didn’t drive it until late the next night. For that money, I added 14 miles of charge. It cost me $2.40 from the local utility company. I sat at the charger for an hour and a half. So I took the groceries home, and then at 11 PM, I drove to the nearest public charging station, at an office park two miles from my house. The Whole Foods at the Domain had free Chargepoint outlets. I wanted to return it at about 50 percent. The driving around to my hobbies had drained the battery to about 42 percent. So instead, I broke my usual habits and went to the grocery store on a Saturday night even though we didn’t really need groceries. It was at the outlet mall in Round Rock, about a 20-minute drive from my house. Ford told me about the local fast public charger that could rev my vehicle to 80 percent or so in 40 minutes. We don’t have a dedicated EV vehicle charger at the house. It’s the truck of the future.īut charging was definitely an issue. We aren’t truck people, but if I were to buy a truck, I would buy the F-150 Lightning. Occasionally we haul bags of mulch from the garden store. I took it to trivia night at Billy’s on Burnet, to the Texas Card House down the street, back to The Lodge again, to the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, and then to The Lodge a couple more times. Then I drove it to The Lodge card house where I was playing in a poker tournament. I don’t own a horse or a unicorn, and I wasn’t about to borrow a small trailer. As a Ford representative said to me, “The 300-mile range is assuming you’re floating on marshmallows while tugged along by a unicorn.” And it’s definitely true that the Lightning loses electric range rapidly when you try to tow or haul something. Spoiler alert: despite the fact that the Lightning has 580 horsepower with the extended-range battery, the horse would have died because the car would have run out of charge. Do you get stranded anywhere? Then ask a large-animal veterinarian what the effects on a real horse would have been.” See how much longer it takes you to get there than it would have with a hybrid or full ICE vehicle. Remember you have to stop to rest and water your “horse” for one hour for every four hours of drive time. Make it fairly rural and put some hills in the middle. Set a reasonable destination for yourself, say 500 miles away. Put 1200-1500 lbs of ballast in the back. “Here’s what I want you to do: Borrow a small horse trailer. I posted a photo of my toy of the week on Facebook. There was an outlet charger and a phone charger, and a large iPad-sized screen on the center console.īut given that the Lightning is fully electric, is it any good for someone who actually needs a truck to do truck things? Charging problems The center console opened up to reveal a laptop tray. If I were a successful construction contractor, I could run a whole business from in there, which has been the point of contemporary trucks for a while they’re for people who do physical work, and they’re also mobile offices. The one I received, on the other hand, was a Platinum edition, which comes in at $95,000. The base-level Lightning comes in at about $49,000, which is not a lot compared with what a new car costs. ![]() I loved it so much floating inside that cab made me feel happy and prosperous. ![]() But it drove smoothly and quietly and with basically no vibration. The truck was more than 19 feet long, including a five-and-a-half foot bed, and had a 12-foot wheel base, not easy to maneuver into a tight parking space. The Lightning was high-end, magnificent, elegant and high-tech inside, without feeling pretentious. I cruised silently across the highways of Austin, drifting above the carbon-spewing masses. And yet I gazed at it with fresh wonder, like it was a piece of alien technology that had crash-landed in my yard. This one had nearly 15,000 miles on it, ready to be put out from the fleet to stud every car writer and their second cousin had driven it by that point. Then, at last, on a Wednesday morning, they dropped one off in my driveway. When my editor reactivated me, the Lightning was my first priority. ![]() This new F-150 floated in my vision from afar, like a celebrity who’d never talk to me at a party. I’d been out of the car-writing racket for nearly four years, which didn’t bother me much, but occasionally, a car would appear that had me wishing. ![]()
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