(upbeat music)
- Until recently, if you wanted an all-electric pickup truck
you didn't really have any choices,
but now there are models like the Rivian R1T,
the GMC Hummer EV, and what we have here,
the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning.
- They've made the best selling full size pickup truck
for nearly 50 years now.
So if anybody knows their customers,
and they know what a truck needs to do, it's Ford.
And so we've got one here, but we have some questions.
- So when we look at electric vehicles
in other types of vehicle classes,
we look at things like range,
we look at things like efficiency, charging speed,
and we know that's important to truck shoppers,
but there are also other considerations too
we had to take into account.
- Yeah, we have to understand exactly how well
does an F-150 Lightning truck.
How well can it do truck things?
How well does it tow?
How far can it tow?
Given that it's an electric vehicle,
the towing range is gonna be probably a lot less.
How well does it handle with a payload?
That's just generally what we test in any kind of truck,
but how all of these things mix together
when you've got an electric power train
is something we're just not familiar with
and something that we really decided we needed to test.
- [Mike] And so to do that, we took this truck
to the drag strip to do some acceleration testing
with and without payload.
And we also took it towing with this camper,
because we wanted to see what kind of range we would get,
how efficient it would be, and also how long
it would take to recharge when you're on the road.
- All very important questions.
And really, it helps us answer the question,
how well does the F-150 Lightning act
when you need it to be a pickup truck?
- So we tested a Lariat version of the Lightning.
It has a dual motor drive train
that gives it four wheel drive,
and it's rated at 580 horsepower
and 775 pounds-feet of torque.
It also has an extended range battery
for an EPA estimated 320 miles of range.
And the price as tested is around $80,000.
- And, you know, that's cool and all Mike,
but remember this thing?
This is the 2021 Ford F-150 PowerBoost Hybrid.
It was our previous favorite electrified Ford F-150.
It won our best of 2021 award.
And we still have it in our long-term fleet.
So we figured why not bring it along with the F-150
Lightning to the track and doing the towing tests
to see what a baseline gasoline version does
against Ford's new electrified pickup.
- [Mike] We started our testing at the drag strip
and it showed just how quick the F-150 Lightning is
despite a hefty curb weight approaching 6,800 pounds.
We found that whether you have any payload in its cargo bed
or not the dual motor four-wheel drive truck
launches with a vengeance with just a bit of wheel slip
as its four tires, dig for traction.
60 miles per hour arrives in just 4.19 seconds
when the bed is empty,
and with 1,200 pounds of sandbag secured in the back,
the zero to 60 mile per hour time
increases just 0.6 seconds to 4.79.
The F-150 Hybrid by comparison, is more than
a second and a half behind the Lightning in both tests.
The Lightning's immediate power delivery was also apparent
in our 50 to 70 mile hour acceleration test.
Which can be useful for gauging its higher speed
passing performance.
Unloaded it bested the F-150 Hybrid by nearly a second,
1.99 seconds versus 2.96.
The F-150 Hybrid takes a moment to respond
with a transmission kick down before accelerating,
but when you're in the F-150 Lightning
it just shoots forward instantly, no waiting required.
With our sandbag payload in the bed of each truck,
the gap grew to 1.07 seconds with the F-150 Lightning
going from 50 to 70 in 2.26,
versus 3.33 for the F-150 Hybrid.
After the track testing,
it was time to take the truck on our towing route,
an approximately 140-mile loop
that passed through the south suburbs of Chicago
and the farming communities beyond.
- So this is my first time towing
with the all-electric F-150 Lightning.
And I have to say it's actually something
of a surreal experience.
I'm pretty familiar with towing with Fords.
I just recently towed an Airstream,
very similar to this one, with the latest Ford Expedition,
and while the interior looks very similar to that truck,
the experience of towing the thing differs considerably.
First of all, it is silent.
There's no noise.
You don't hear anything. There's no power train roar.
It's just smooth and quiet.
You hear a lot of the things like the trailer creaking
every now and then, but you also don't hear
a lot of wind noise.
You don't hear a lot of tire noise.
Ford has done an extraordinary job
in isolating the cabin now that it doesn't have
the engine noise to hide behind anymore.
One thing that is not quite so calming
is you're always keeping your eye on that range.
And when you hook up a trailer to it
it's gonna take a little while,
a couple of miles at least, anywhere like,
it took this one about 7 to 10 miles
before it changes the range prediction
from what it thinks you should be getting,
based on the inputs that you you've made
for storing your trailer in the actual towing data system,
to what it actually feels the trailer is doing
and how you are driving.
And case in point, it dropped my predicted range
from 152 miles to 138 miles, (snaps) just like that.
It just suddenly decided based on the conditions
on what you're doing, and the terrain,
and how the energy usage has been going,
you're not gonna get quite that mileage
that we originally told you you were going to.
Which, you know, fine. Great.
I'd rather, they told me that so that I'm not expecting
to go 152 miles and come dead at 140.
So right now it says 136 miles of range,
but it's holding pretty steady there.
So I think that now that it's had a chance
to learn the trailer, to learn the driving style,
to learn the terrain that we're driving on,
hopefully that has improved its accuracy just a little bit.
- So I'm now in the Lightning.
We've switched drivers at the midpoint,
approximately in our route.
And so far we've driven about 85 miles.
We have about 55 miles to go before we reach the end of it.
And our current projected range in the F-150 Lightning
is 71 miles.
So looks like we'll be all right,
but this part of our route is all interstate.
So higher speeds.
And the first part we were on a mix
of two lane country roads, some suburban roads.
So the higher speeds here will be interesting to see
how that affects our projected range.
(upbeat music)
So we just got a warning that our driving range is low.
We've reached 50 miles of range remaining
in the Lightning and we've traveled 106 miles.
We've been going around 55 to 60 miles per hour
on the interstate, not too fast,
but for the last 10 miles or so
I've been watching the predicted range
with a distance travel and it's been pretty consistent.
So it seems like that 50 mile figure
is something we can rely on for the last part of our drive
as we try and get back.
We have around 33 miles left to go
before we get back to our starting point.
So we made it back.
We traveled 136 miles total
and the truck is saying we have 27 miles of range left.
When we first started, we had a 97% battery charge.
It was showing 317 miles of range.
That got revised down to 158 with our trailer added.
And then it dropped again as the truck
kind of was able to get a sense of how the trailer
was affecting performance.
So once we were at that amount of range
it seemed pretty consistent through the rest of our trip
to the point where we're at now.
The F-150 Lightning's average efficiency
was 1.3 miles per kilowatt hour
at the end of our towing drive,
or around half the 2.5 miles per kilowatt hour
we observed when we drove the truck
on the same route the following day without a trailer.
Not surprisingly, the F-150 Hybrid
also saw its average efficiency cut
in approximately half when towing.
From a trip computer average of 26.6 miles per gallon,
when driven without a trailer to 12.6 miles per gallon
when towing the 5,900 pound Airstream.
Even though the trucks saw similar efficiency losses,
the F-150 Hybrid and its 30-gallon fuel tank
give it a theoretical driving range when towing
that's more than double the F-150 Lightning's.
The F-150 Hybrid's refueling time
can also be measured in minutes,
which is a lot less, as we learned,
than the time it takes to fast charge an F-150 Lightning.
So we're now at an Electrify America fast charging station.
We're going to connect the F-150 Lightning
and see how long it takes to recharge the battery.
Before we could even begin our fast charging tests
we had to unhitch the Airstream from the truck.
Unlike most gas stations where you can
pull through with a trailer to refuel,
most public charging stations we've encountered
aren't designed that way.
Instead, they're often located on the outskirts
of a shopping center with the charger
at the curb in front of a regular parking spot.
If we had left the Airstream hitched while charging,
it would've blocked a traffic lane in the parking lot
and we didn't wanna be those people.
It only took around five minutes to unhitch the trailer,
but it added another step in the process.
At the start of our charging test,
the F-150 Lightning's battery was at 17%
and the truck was showing a predicted range of 26 miles.
45 minutes later, the battery had reached an 80%
state of charge with the charger's screen
showing 84.5 kilowatt hours of energy added.
Charging speeds were fairly consistent
over the 45 minutes session,
ranging from around 100 to 125 kilowatts.
However, the truck's predicted range at 80%
was only 127 miles,
a reflection of the truck's recent towing work.
That didn't seem like a lot of range to us,
so even though fast charging speeds
tend to drop when charging above 80%,
we kept going in order to maximize our range,
as an owner on a towing trip might.
As expected, our charging speed dipped
as we passed an 80% state of charge.
It took one hour and 25 minutes
to go from 80 to a hundred percent,
and this added just 36 miles of predicted range,
for a total predicted range of 163 miles.
Over the entire charging session,
the F-150 Lightning added 115.4 kilowatt hours of energy
at a cost of $49.45.
- So we've tested the F-150 Lightning now.
We've driven it at the drag strip.
We've towed a camper with it.
We've recharged with it.
We've had a decent amount of experience in the thing now.
What do you think of it?
- I think the truck definitely has its strengths,
but there are also some shortcomings
that a potential buyer needs to know about.
The thing is incredibly quick at the drag strip
for how big and heavy it is.
It tows really nice.
We saw that when we were towing this camper with it.
Just really smooth, quiet.
But we also saw those downsides.
- It tows really well.
It just doesn't tow really far.
We also towed through Illinois, where it's largely flat,
it's still relatively slow, under 65 miles per hour,
and there isn't a whole lot of hills.
If you're gonna be towing somewhere like Colorado
or California, you're gonna see less range.
But I really think I kind of drew home the fact
that it's a good towing truck,
but for very specific towing applications.
- Yeah, it's not gonna be that kind of cross country
travel truck just because of that range,
but also how long it took to get back to 100%
when we were fast charging it.
The full charging time from 20 to 100%
was two hours and 10 minutes.
And if you're on the road,
that's gonna really add to your trip.
- But if you're saying just towing your boat
to the a lake 40 minutes away,
or if you towing like a trailer full of landscaping
equipment around town for your business,
then it actually does make sense.
It really does work because you're going back
to a specific known charging spot every day,
and that really will help aid you
in your operation of the vehicle.
- Oh yeah.
- So I think we were certainly impressed with the new
F-150 Lightning and you definitely can use it
as you would normally use a pickup truck,
but, there's a caveat there, you might not necessarily
be able to use it in every way
that you used a gas powered pickup truck in the past.
But if you'd like to know more
about the new 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning
you can look everything up on cars.com.