Ford has started delivering F-150 Lightning to retail customers after it began shipping the electric pickups to US dealers in mid-May.
While the automaker has not officially announced the start of customer deliveries yet, owners have begun sharing their F-150 Lightning delivery experiences on social media. Actually, there's only one we know of so far.
Nicholas, a member of the F-150 Lightning Forum going by the nickname of oneguynick, claims he is the very first retail customer to take delivery of Ford's electric pickup. He says a Ford public relations representative confirmed to him that he was officially the first. The fact that he lives in Michigan likely has something to do with that as the F-150 Lightning is built at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn.
It probably helped too that he ordered the top-dog F-150 Lightning Platinum model, which starts at $90,874 and offers 300 miles of range and an 8,500-pound towing capacity.
Gallery: First retail customer takes delivery of 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning
He preordered his vehicle on May 20, 2021, and the order was confirmed on January 7, 2022. His F-150 Lightning was built on April 18 (before the company actually announced the start of production) and he took delivery of it on May 26. In a post on the forum, he notes that the dealership applied no markup on the vehicle.
"I wanted to mention that my dealership carried the exact quoted price, and there is no dealer fee on top of what my build+taxes already included. Granted, it's a tiny town and Richardson's is known to take care of folks, but given the posts of others, I wanted to mention they were doing the right thing."
That's good to hear seeing as how commonplace the practice of applying markups has become, especially on widely anticipated EVs like the F-150 Lightning.
In the forum post, Nicholas also notes that his truck was delivered with 62 miles on the odometer, which is a bit high. However, the Ford dealer told him the factory used it around the track (probably to make sure that everything was running properly before delivery).
The fact that Ford started delivering F-150 Lightnings to retail customers is great, but with 200,000 reservations for the electric truck, the automaker has a challenging task ahead. CEO Jim Farley recently announced that Ford would double the production capacity to 150,000 vehicles a year to meet demand.
