Hey everyone, this is Michael Wayland with CNBC.
We are here in San Antonio, Texas, testing out the electric F-150 Lightning.
Yes, electric. It is the company's first all-electric pickup truck and it's the first mainstream all-electric
pickup truck to market.
This is a very important truck, not just for the company, but to test the popular demand, as well as
mainstream America's acceptance of electric vehicles.
Let's go take it for a drive.
It's fast, a lot faster than the regular gasoline truck.
And if you just listen, there's really not much
there except for a little bit of road noise.
So while a lot of people might be comparing the Rivian R1T, the Hummer and this, they are
very different vehicles and they have very different use cases.
What they wanted to do was create a pickup truck for pickup truck owners.
Ford is essentially the only one right now in the market.
You've got the GMC Hummer.
I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a regular full-size pickup truck.
It's a Hummer. It is flamboyant.
It is lavish.
It's extravagant.
And it's meant to make a statement for GM.
And then you've also got the Rivian R1T, which again is more priced as a luxury vehicle,
but it's meant to go off-roading, adventure, lifestyle vehicle.
It's not necessarily meant for the everyday kind of work truck customer that Ford
appeals to so much.
It just did that with ease.
And we were on a, looked like an 18 to 20% grade going up, and it
handled everything just really simply.
And the battery just keeps it planted to the ground much better than a regular full-sized
pickup truck could handle.
One of the most unique things about
EVs is a front trunk, also known as a frunk.
And this frunk is the largest to come to market yet.
And Ford did a lot and concentrated on this quite a bit to make it usable for truck customers,
things a lot of people wouldn't think of.
They have active power in here.
They have a storage bin that you can put ice in and it's got a drain.
So think about tailgating.
They're calling it frunk-gating.
And some of the things that Ford's been saying is that firefighters can put evidence in there because it's lockable
storage. So the front trunk is kind of unlocking a lot of different use cases for the company.
One of the crazy things that automakers have been doing with new pickup trucks is actually innovating the tailgate.
It's something that everyone seems so simple and it's been the same for decades, honestly.
But Ford has a power one and it also has a step right here.
And then right here, it actually has measurements in centimeters and inches to be able to work.
But the real power and the real uniqueness here for the lightning is all of the power it can
bring to the back. And you can power a jobsite with this.
They say you can power your house if you need to.
One of the most important things to a lot of truck customers is the towing, and the F-150 Lightning
can tow up to 10,000 pounds.
And that can do anything from an 8,300 pound electric boat and trailer like we're about to do or a horse carriage or
anything else they might need to do for work.
The battery is at 81% and 119 miles of range left.
Let's see how it tows this boat.
Let's see how the acceleration is while we're towing 8,300 pounds.
I mean, more than enough to help you merge into traffic on a highway while you're towing.
And again, the ease of use with all of this is there's no gear shifting.
So you don't feel kind of that jerkiness that you would with an internal combustion engine.
It's just very smooth.
One pedal and you can go.
One of the things Ford has been saying about this truck is the range accuracy.
It says that they were really trying to be spot on with everything, and that includes towing.
We just did about a 40-minute lap and 15.4 miles and it was spot
on.
We've touched on a lot of things on the F-150 lightning so far, and everything has been up to par with the name
of an F-150.
But one of the things we did run into problems with was Ford's new BlueCruise system, which is their hands-free
driving technology.
On certain curves, the vehicle shut off the system and then turned back on after the curve.
Ford tells us that that's actually how it is designed to do this right now, and they hope to
update that in the future to make the system be able to handle it.
And there you have it, the electric Ford F-150 Lightning.
It's currently being produced at a plant in Michigan and shipped to dealers.
But there's about 200,000 reservation holders who are first in line, along with some fleet owners.
Overall, the truck performed how Ford said it would.
Now we just got to see how the reception is in the marketplace.