Owning a Ford F-150 Lightning Electric Truck | 3-Year Review

Electric truck. Is this thing more of an EV or a pickup? We bought this Ford F-150 Lightning about two and a half years ago to answer that exact question. And in that time, we've done everything with it. We've done truck stuff, EV stuff, moved apartments, towed with it, and I even got stuck in traffic with it once on purpose. So we know you've got questions. Is this thing a real truck? Would we buy it again? Should Ford drop this EV thing and just stick to gas? Well, after 20,000 miles of the Lightning, I think it's fair to say we've got answers. In our time with the Lightning, we have found plenty of things to like about this vehicle, but before we get into those, we just wanted to ask you to please like and subscribe because that helps us to keep buying vehicles like this to put in our year-long test fleet so we can keep telling you what these vehicles are like to own in the real world. Now, of the many powertrains available in the F-150 family, so we're talking V8, small V6, big V6, Raptor V6 hybrid, Raptor V8 electric, of the many, many options, this electric one just might be the best. Acceleration is smooth and easy around town, and then when you give it the beans, like, dang, look out, this thing is quick. And before you say that you need gas or diesel to tow, the Lightning makes a terrific tow rig. It's super torquey and very quiet. Right now, this is the best F-150 to pull a trailer with. The Lightning has an extra 200 pounds-feet of torque compared to the F-150 hybrid, and that makes towing with the EV great. We even brought our Lightning to a tractor pull along with our Rivian R1T. Even when you're not towing obscenely large objects, we prefer towing in the Lightning over the Rivian for two key reasons. One, it has much better side mirrors, and two, you can enter the specs of the trailer into the screen, and it will adjust your range much more accurately. Speaking of range. So our F-150 has the extended range battery, which significantly increases the range over the standard model. In Edmunds testing, we drove 345 miles on a single charge. That's 25 miles further than the EPA estimate. That was good for an electric pickup when the Lightning debuted, but the competition has quickly surpassed the Ford's range. We've driven a GMC Sierra EV over 500 miles on a single charge. The Lightning's huge battery and ample outlets in the bed give it even more utility. Pro Power Onboard is great. It's got tons of juice. You can use it for wilderness camping. You can use it for tailgating. I even saw at a job site, a contractor running his entire job site, all the guys running their tools off that one truck as he used it for an office. It's awesome. If your work involves having a mouse in your hand more often than a jackhammer, the Lightning is also great for that. The F-150's center console has a fold-out table that's pretty handy. The angle might be a little awkward, but sometimes there's a line at the charging station or sometimes I have to charge from a really low percent all the way back up to full. So it's nice to be able to fold it out and get a little work done. And of course, the form factor means that it's awesome at regular truck stuff as well. I leaned super hard on the Lightning for a move a couple of weeks ago. I thought about getting a box truck, but the Lightning killed it. The bed was wide enough that I could throw a clean mattress back there. It accommodated my new-to-me vintage desk easily. And when I had to move a bunch of plants, I was able to fold up the seat cushion in the back seat of the cab, which made a ton of space inside. So my plants weren't getting blown around in the back. And even when I had a ton of boxes, thousand pounds of stuff in the bed, no problem from that power tray and the Lightning barely seemed to notice. So thank you, Light. Ford stood alone in the EV truck market when the Lightning launched. But even though more competitors have emerged since then, the Lightning is still one of our favorites. We got a Silverado EV just in time to compare it to the Lightning. And the Silverado has some pretty cool things about it. It charges crazy fast. It has a huge range and the bed is super flexible, but we still like the Lightning more. The interior of the Lightning is just nicer. And part of that is because the infotainment has Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It can haul more and it's just nicer to drive overall. On top of all that, it costs a lot less money. When we compared the Lightning against the Tesla Cybertruck and Rivian's R1T, it was immediately clear that the Ford stood apart from the other two pickups as the only conventional pickup of the bunch. And it's the one that will be the most familiar to existing truck owners. That's part of the reason the Lightning earned a best of the best designation in Edmunds top rated awards. You'll get into it and you'll think, oh, this is just like my regular truck. Then you'll drive it and you'll go, whoa, this is way better than my regular truck. Now we're gonna get into a few things that we didn't enjoy so much about the Lightning. And one of them is directly tied to its weight. So this weighs about a thousand pounds more than an F-150 hybrid. And you definitely notice it when you're on the road. The Lightning is a big and heavy truck. It feels portly and wobbly when you're driving over undulating pavement bumps in the road. That's the worst at highway speeds in particular. You're bouncing and heaping and everything just feels a little bit all over the place. My commute has a lot of drainage ditches and curves on it. And man, you can feel the weight of this truck, just the mass it has when you hit bumps or when you're trying to go around a turn. It's so apparent how heavy it is. It honestly feels a little more like driving a 2500 series with a load in it than driving a 1500. All of the F-150s extra weight comes from that big battery, but it's not alone in this. All of the electric trucks, they weigh at least this much, including the Rivian. Battery powered truck ownership also comes with one other drawback that you might be able to predict. The big battery Lightning is nice because it gives you pretty good range. The problem is it's a big battery and it takes a really long time to fill that battery when it's time to charge. Good news is we found a 350 kilowatt Electrify America charger with a nice little overhead canopy nestling behind a comfort inn. That's the good news. The bad news is that we have a truck with a trailer and absolutely no way of connecting said truck and trailer to the power. So what we got to do now is decouple the trailer and then pull the truck in. That's going to take a few minutes, but it's still faster going through all that hassle for the 350 kilowatts than it would be to go back up the road to the 50. Does that work? This is kind of the arsehole move, right? Hope he's not a big dude. You just have to take more things into consideration when you're towing with an electric vehicle. And we're not just talking about distance. We're also talking about things like trailer aerodynamics, average speed, and whether or not you can find a charging station to accommodate your vehicle along with a trailer. As much as we like towing with the Lightning from behind the wheel, it has less than half the effective range of the F-150 hybrid. Plus it's much harder and frankly, not much cheaper to refuel. Now in our Lightning with a box trailer behind it weighing about 7,500 pounds, we saw range drop all the way down to around 130 miles, even though this vehicle achieved 332 miles on the world famous Edmunds EV range test. In the years since then, other electric trucks have come around that offer a lot more range than the Lightning, including the Rivian R1T with MaxPack, Chevrolet Silverado EV, and of course the GMC Sierra EV, which currently sits atop our range leaderboard. All of those vehicles will also take a big hit to efficiency when they're towing something shaped like a brick, but they will also go further than the Lightning will on a single charge. So the Lightning is pretty great if all you're looking to do is tow a boat to the Lake 50 miles and back, but for anything longer range, you should probably consider something with more conventional fuels like the Ford F-150 hybrid. Fans of the Edmunds channel will know that we've also owned an F-150 hybrid for several years and another difference between the two trucks really surprised us. You know, it's funny. I kind of expected our 50,000 mile F-150 hybrid would feel so much worse for the wear than this 20,000 mile F-150 Lightning, but that's really not the case. The Lightning has so many more squeaks and rattles and it's not like we drove it any harder than the hybrid. In fact, I'd argue we beat the crap out of our F-150 hybrid way more often than the Lightning. Whoa! Yeah, buddy! Big trucks are hard enough to park as it is, but there were a couple of elements of the F-150 Lightning that made it even more difficult to maneuver. One pedal driving with all that mass feels kind of jerky and it's really noticeable when you're trying to reverse in a tight space like a parking lot. Look, all surround view cameras distort what you're looking at, but for me and the F-150 around the edges of the image, it's just especially noticeable. And I also think it doesn't do a great job of stitching together the front, rear, and side camera views. So overall, just expect a little bit more from a high-tech vehicle. Thankfully, our Lightning was relatively problem-free from a maintenance and repair standpoint. In fact, all that it had was two dealer visits to fix a few recalls each, seven in total, not an unreasonable number for a brand new vehicle, and those were taken care of quickly and at no cost to us. Man, I love it when this segment is short. So, what's our Lightning worth today? You've probably been hearing a lot about falling values for used EVs, so we were extra curious to see what we would get back for our truck. We bought our 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Lariat for a smidge over $80,000. And after two and a half years and about 22,000 miles of ownership, it is worth $40,000, or right about half of what we paid for it. So, it's not the value disaster that some of the other EVs that we own have been. For example, our Blazer EV that we owned for just over a year and 8,000 miles, it also depreciated 50%. And our Fisker Ocean, we're not even going to talk about the bath we took on that vehicle. But compared to the gas and hybrid trucks, this is definitely worse. Our Ford F-150 Hybrid that we also sold recently, it depreciated about 50% as well. But that truck was a year older and had more than double the miles. So, here's where we stand. A few years after its introduction, the Lightning remains compelling. And that's because a lot of its competitors are lifestyle vehicles, while the Lightning is more of a truck than a toy. And it would feel just as at home at a job site as it does at a tailgate. Would we buy it again? That's a bit of a complicated question. Not because we didn't like our Lightning, but because of how much we loved our F-150 Hybrid. Don't get me wrong, I really like our F-150 Lightning, but the longer that we have these two trucks side-by-side, I would just rather have the Hybrid. After spending quite a bit of time in the Lightning, I don't know if I'd pick it over our F-150 Hybrid. Both trucks are great, but you're going to spend a lot less time filling up the F-150 Hybrid than you are going to charge the Lightning. I'm a big fan of EVs, but when it comes to the F-150, the Hybrid's going to be my pick. All things considered, I'd take the Lightning. No question I would choose the Hybrid. Hybrid all the way. I love that truck. F-150 Hybrid for me. For me, Hybrid, I road trip too much. I don't want to charge the truck. I just think Ford nailed this Hybrid powertrain. I like it more. While the Lightning might not have beaten the Hybrid in our eyes, let's not forget that it took home a lot of hardware on its own, winning back-to-back Edmunds Best Electric Truck Awards and even a Best of the Best Award in 2023. That makes the Lightning one of the most well-decorated and well-used vehicles in our entire garage, and we will be sad to see it go. And maybe we'll replace it with Ford's next take on what an electric pickup can be because its first one, it was damn good. Thanks for watching.