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I own a Ford F-150 Lightning [1]

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Date: 2025-02-24

Feb 2024 I bought a new Ford F-150 Lightning. Health was poor, thought “if I don’t do it now I won’t ever do it at all”. There are four models, I bought level 2 because that was what i could afford. Higher up the price goes up but I didn’t need those features, or the monthly payment difference. His name is Sparky :)

Mentioned having it a few weeks later somewhere here, and Meteor Blades suggested I write about it after six months. I chose to wait for the one-year mark, which is this week, so I’d have a full year of info.

The basic things: it’s an F-150, so it LOOKS like a truck, drives like a truck. It is electric, dual motor AWD so the drive train is NOTHING like a gasoline truck, and I charge it overnight.

I bought large battery, for extra miles: 320. I haven’t tested that to see if it really IS 320, that seems like an unwise idea. You can casually charge it on a 15-amp circuit at home, that is what I am doing. This is Level 1, it’s not fast. You can get a bigger 240-volt charging circuit installed at your house (hire an electrician to do this, don’t be stupid); the charging unit has an adapter for this power socket. This is Level 2. Although it did take a while, I just recently received the adaptor plug to use a Tesla Supercharger. This is Level 3. I am going to try that out tomorrow or the next day; there’s only one in my entire county, but it’s never busy. I’m curious about how fast that really is. My sister has an electric vehicle, she paid for the new power circuit, she gets a full charge overnight. If I had to do more driving I’d do that.

Because it has an on-board large battery, it weighs an additional 1000 pounds, 7000 all total. This will of course provide extra traction over a gasoline F-150 (like my old one). Because I live out in the country, previous owner of my house installed a secondary breaker and “fail-over” switch so I could run the house off a generator...or Sparky. There’s a special power cable in the garage to do it. I have not tried to yet. Maybe this spring. The battery is about 100KW, so I could run my house for a while. We have had a couple of power outages where it was a couple of days; one was a heavy snow (that was bad, we had to abandon the house for 48 hours), one was mid-summer when we weren’t moved in yet.

The primary difference vs a gasoline vehicle is that of course you worry about charging differently. You watch the range indicator number on the dash, and the charge % instead of a tank gauge. My old F-150 had a range indication, I did like that; it had the 35-gallon tank, so peak range was ~750 miles, which could therefore go anywhere I would go (which included to the beach and back).

Sparky won’t go to the beach. I’ll have to charge in the middle somewhere. So I now have Tesla chargers available, that helps. It is, however, a chore to do trip planning around chargers, because each charger locater website is different, there’s no unified map, and even then they are seldom conveniently located. Most chargers seem to be at car dealers or motels. Makes sense, but if I’m on a trip I want them associated with food locations. Or rest stops. (I confess that on trips where gas is low and you’re away from town that I have felt nervous about where the next gas station is going to be.) Anyway, the refill anxiety is different. I’m still learning about this whole routine; mostly l drive near my house and do Level 1 recharge overnight or over weekend.

Level 1 charging seems to be about 3 miles worth of battery per hour. Probably less in the winter. Level 2 should be about 4X that. Level 3 is under an hour to fill the tank. I typically only drive 20 miles/day. Tomorrow or the next day I’m to the local Tesla station and see what happens. Battery will be about 50% at that point. Later: OK, I went over to the superchargers. Worked fine. Charged about 25% (65-->90) in 45 minutes. Cost: $23, not a good deal. Won’t do that again at that price. But if I were to take it to the beach I could do the full drive with a long lunch stop, if I can figure out where.

The range and usage rate varies on outside ambient temperature. Batteries don’t like being cold, so the range drops, and the usage rate goes up. You have to watch this to learn what it is telling you. Range is down 10-20% if it’s really cold. Usage rate goes up. I don’t know what the accuracy of that number actually is, it doesn’t seem too good, like I’ll drive to work (10 miles) and it will say range is down by 20 miles.

Being an EV, there’s no engine taking up a lot of space, so you get a “frunk”, or “FRont trUNK”. It’s foam-weatherstripping-sealed, thus I have tool stuff in there that I want protected. It also has a half-dozen power connectors, for 120VAC and 240VAC. This is where I’d plug in the house, or work power tools if I’m in the field. Good stuff.

The read bed size is 5.5 feet, relatively standard. Holds what I need to drag around, which is NOT sheets of plywood. The bed has a liner, that’s actually important. I put a cover on it.

We’ve had several snows this winter. It has handled well. My driveway is 1700 feet long, you can’t snowblower that (even at half my age). I’d have to have a tractor and a plow, and my neighbor comes and does it for me anyway. What I do is drive end-to-end a few times to pack it down. My wife now has an AWD vehicle too so she can get in/out after I do that. Son has a generic sedan, so he’s SOL in a snow; wife’s previous car was a Mustang, she was SOL too.

Finally: my health seems better now, but I’m still glad I bought it.

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