We see more and more electric cars come out each year, but YouTuber Marques Brownlee discovered the new 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning has more going for it than being a battery-powered pickup.
Vehicles that ditch the old internal combustion engine to run on a charge aren’t all that uncommon to see driving around, but all-electric pickup trucks are still basically unheard of.
Obviously, the most-hyped electric truck is Tesla’s Cybertruck, but Ford is entering the market as well with an emissions-free version of the F-150 called the “Lightning” that Brownlee found gets more mileage per charge than the stats might let on.
Being the big-time YouTuber that he is, Brownlee got a chance to take the truck for a spin long before it’s available for sale in 2022 and discovered it seems to be on par or better than current electric vehicles (Teslas included) for how far it can drive on a single charge.
It’s got all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a brand new car: touchscreens, an overabundance of various charging ports, and a massive front trunk (since it has no engine) that can even be used as a cooler.
Features are fine, but if you’re buying an electric truck or any other vehicle for that matter you want to make sure you’ll be able to spend more time driving than you will be charging. On paper, The F-150 Lightning gets 300 miles on a full charge according to Ford, but MKBHD found it’s actually closer to 460 miles, which beats a lot of 2021 electric car models.
“That 300-mile range that I talked about, I was like eh, that’s pretty good for their first-generation, but it’s not amazing or anything like that for coming out next year. But that 300-mile range is the EPA rating with 1000 pounds of cargo in the truck,” Brownlee revealed. “So this truck, at our studio with no weight in the truck, was quoting me 360 miles.”
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The kicker is, that was only at about 80% charge, so following some quick maths the YouTuber came up with an estimated total mileage without any weight in the back of roughly 459 miles per charge. So, why isn’t Ford advertising these numbers?
“The reason for doing this EPA rating with 100 pounds in the trunk is they just want to make it easy as possible for people to switch from the gas version of the truck to the electric version,” MKBHD explained. “They just want to give you a safe 300 miles, so they might end up under-promising and overdelivering, but at least you’ll always have 300 miles.”
While he admitted he’s not a “truck person” by any means, Marques seemed impressed with what will be Ford’s competition to the Cybertruck. Even though neither’s on the market yet, it will be interesting to see which one ends up being the bigger success.