That would be rather tone-deaf since most manufacturers are trying to avoid using Native American names for their products.
I do wonder if there will be the possibility to override the battery protection, so that someone could choose if they wanted to use up the truck battery, and power their house longer, or keep the reserve. After Hurricane Sandy there were lots of places without power for a week or more. Of course, those same places were running out of fuel for vehicles, so having a possibility of driving somewhere, getting a quick charge, and then driving back home, would be rather convenient. And then people no longer need to maintain a home generator. Seems like a win-win situation.
In my EV, turning on the AC lowers the mileage estimate slightly, maybe about 12-15 miles less. Turning on the heat lowers it a bit more than that (which I found surprising), but not drastically more. Anecdotally, I would say range loss for me is about 5-6% with AC/heat working.
If they can make enough of them, they’ll be everywhere.
If you are a contractor who works in or around a city, or a farmer needing a working truck, this thing is killer. The ability to have nearly unlimited power for tools no matter where you are is a big feature. But the savings in gas will make a big difference too. Electrifying an already-efficient subcompact car doesn’t save you nearly as much per month as electrifying a pickup that only gets 16 mpg in the city.
The ability to use the truck as a whole-house power supply in an emergency could be a big deal in a lot of areas. Especially as we continue to add intermittant power to the grid and make it less etable. I also read that eventually the truck will be able to timeshift power - charge when power is cheap, then power your house when power is expensive when you aren’t driving. That’s a very cool idea.
And range limits aside, this makes one hell of a recreational vehicle. The frunk and crew cab gives you lots of storage, you could easily tow a light boat or small trailer 100 miles, and if you use it for camping or hunting you have full power at your camp site. You could plug your trailer into the truck and power your trailer without a hookup. Handling is supposedly excellent with all the weight being very low in the vehicle, and it has more HP and torque than the Raptor.
In Canada, the cheapest model you’ll be able to get is the XLT at $68,000. That’s a little spendy for us, but probably works out to be the equivalent of a $50,000 vehicle when you factor in fuel and maintenance savings. I’d probably wait a year or two anyway for the teething problems to get worked out, but this is definitely on our shortlist for next vehicle.
I mean, I just checked out F-150 pricing and starting with an XLT SuperCrew and checking off on a V8, 4x4, and a couple option packages and I’m at $62,000. You can theoretically get trucks under $50k, but I’m not sure many people actually do.
Yeah, the price premium for the electric version is quite low. I know several people who managed to bump up a $45,000 truck to over $70,000 with options. It doesn’t take much.
A truck with 556 Horspower and over 700 lb-ft of torque is never going to be cheap. The F-150 lightning is faster than a Raptor for less money.
In Canada, if you drive 20,000 km, a big V8 pickup burning 15l/100km will cost you somewhere around $4500/yr in gas. If electric costs $1000/yr for charging, you’ll pay off the ‘EV premium’ in about two years. After that it’s all savings.
The reviews for the F-150 EV have been so awesome that I’ve put it on my list of possible future buys and I’ve never considered getting a pick-up before. I doubt I’ll buy one because it’ll be too hard to park (I live in the city) but that’s how good it is.
AC barely at all, but resistive heating does quiet a bit. The Chevy Bolt (I think), and the new Model 3 and Y use a heat pump which is far more efficient than the resistive heater in the old Model 3 (what I have).
It is actually really interesting (to some people). On the Model 3/Y, the AC/heat pump can operate in two modes. It can take heat out of the cabin, and put it into the glycol cooling system (AC); or it can take heat out of the glycol, and put it into the cabin (heater). Because heat pumps are only moving heat, they can put more heat into the cabin than the energy used to run the pump, so it is more than 100% efficient.
I do not know if the Lightning uses a heat pump as a heater.
Here is the actual data from my car over the last few years. This chart only includes drives that are over 20 miles. Shorter drives tend to be even worse, because the heater is running the whole time. However, they are also short, so the extra energy isn’t too important (If I only drive 8 miles in one day, but use 20 miles of range, who cares?) The efficiency in cold weather is also lower because that is (causally) correlated with times I have winter tires on the car, which also hurt efficiency.
Just to be super annoying, I’m going to change the definition of efficiency in the post. Unlike what I talk about with the heat pump, the efficiency% here is the ratio to 246 Wh/Mile, which is what my car is rated at. The bars are the number of miles driven in those temperatures.
So, I get peak efficiency at moderate temperatures, when only the fan has to run to keep the interior cool. It drops a bit as the AC comes on, but I still am averaging better than 100% efficiency—think of it as getting better than the rated MPG—in hot weather.
Our city is getting a new EV truck to replace our oldest pickup (on schedule). We’ve got a 10 sq mi city. It really is a great solution for us, for the reasons you mentioned.
I think that the van idea is a fantastic one; plenty of delivery services would consider EV vans for deliveries with a range of 230 miles and no gas expenses. Similarly, contractors might also for the pickups.
For recreation, the range is still kind of small, especially without good numbers for the extra power drain for towing.
I’d think that for a lot of people, something with less performance and more range would be better.
Does anyone REALLY need 563 HP/775 ft/lb of torque in a pickup? That’s squarely in the sports car range on horsepower, and the super-car range in torque. Put another way, the most powerful gas F150s put out 430 hp/570 ft/lb, with most models around the 300-400 hp/400 ft/lb range.
I mean personally I’d much rather have a smaller Ford Ranger sized truck with 250 hp/300 ft/lb (or even less) of torque that would go about 400 miles, than 563/775 with 230 miles of range.
It’s my understanding (not that I know much) that higher torque is just how these EV motors roll, and there is not a great deal of sacrifice of range to get higher horsepower or torque. I think range is mainly dependent on size of the traction battery - how many KwH are packed in there.
Many EV’a also have an eco mode, which essentially damps the accelerator pedal, and maximizes the regeneration.
So here’s my million dollar idea: Since towing will be the biggest lim fac of the new Lightning how about you place an extra 150kWh battery in the floor of the trailer. I’m thinking primarily travel trailers/RVs here. No propane for heating, plug in at the camp site to recharge slowly, and use that extra juice to extend your truck’s range. Added bonus, you could fast charge both at the same time on the road.
As an example, I believe the Tesla Model 3’s rear drive unit (Motor, inverter, and single speed transmission) weighs less than 200 lbs, and puts out roughly 300 peak horsepower.
A roughly equivalent V-6 engine and transmission together is probably 3 times that weight (and bulk).
So for an EV design, if you already need a giant battery pack anyway for maximum range, might as well just match it with a decent performance motor.
Upthread, there is a link to the Ford webpage on the E-Transit, their electric van. Among other things it says, “By leveraging more than 30 million miles of Ford Telematics™ data, we learned that the average daily range for commercial vans in the U.S. is 74 miles.” So a range of 230 miles will work for most customers.
To expand on this a bit, a large battery pack automatically gives you extremely high power. Especially if you’re using a chemistry with a high charge rate–fast charging implies fast discharging.
Furthermore, any EV with AWD is going to use two (or more) motors, one for front and back. The motor is substantially lighter than any kind of mechanical power transfer system, and also doesn’t require a driveshaft tunnel, etc.
But each motor assembly has some minimum size just for the differential and reduction gears and such. You just don’t save much by putting a really tiny motor on each one. So instead, put a decent size motor on each axle, use the battery power you already have, and end up with a really high performance vehicle.
Commercial vans. And I can believe that; back in college when I delivered flowers, a LONG day was right about 100 miles. Most days were in the 60-80 range. That consisted of driving about 15 miles in to downtown, and then driving all around central Houston and back to the company.
But that’s commercial use. Non-commercial users probably have a very different pattern of usage. Most users probably have a commute somewhere in the 5-25 mile range, and then probably a few sporadic road trips of more than 100 miles a few times a year.
And that’s important- only 20% of the new electric F150 are expected to be sold to commercial customers.
7.5 kW continuous power, it will run for 11 hours at max rating on 6.6 gallons of gas. So, 82.5 kWh. This is essentially a portable level 2 charger. It can also run on propane, so you can use the propane bottles and fittings on your RV. It only weighs 87 kilos, and you could almost fit it in the frunk if you removed the protective bars.
It might seem weird to carry a gas generator to charge your EV, but this would basically be a range extender for the rare times when you want to drive out to the limits of your range. Even as a work vehicle, you could leave the generator at home 90% of the time, but if you absolutely had to drive 200 miles to a job site with no chargers on the route, this would save your bacon. Get to the job, fire up the generator, and a few hours later you have enough charge to get home.
It would also be great to have for emergencies, like if you had to evacuate an area and the grid was down. Lash a few five gallon jerry cans to the inside of the truck bed, and you could go a long, long way. Or keep the truck heat running for weeks if you were stuck somewhere in the winter.
The nice thing about an EV truck is that it can carry so much that you could easily do something like this. Or you could even just carry a smaller portable generator in the Frunk. Honda makes suitcase-sized generators that can output 2.2 kW, and you can daisy-chain them together if you need more.
On the other hand, Ford has already patented a range extender battery that goes in the bed of the truck and looks like one of those toolboxes you see there in construction vehicles:
