Will the all-new Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck work for you if you have to haul a heavy load? How about if that hauling will take place over a great distance? As recently promised, our good friend Kyle Conner and the team over at Out of Spec Reviews put the Lightning to the test to get us the answers.
Electric vehicles are now coming to market with much more range than they had in the past. However, most EVs won't be used for towing and hauling. Now that electric pickup trucks and larger SUVs are arriving, it's important to take a closer look at how weight impacts range, and we already know that towing will take away around 50% of an EV's range, give or take.
If you regularly follow InsideEVs and/or Out of Spec, you may have done a double-take here, or perhaps you had some Deja Vu. This is because we recently published a video almost identical to the one above, though instead of featuring the F-150 Lightning, it was the Rivian R1T.
Out of Spec loaded up the R1T to its maximum payload capacity to get an idea of how much the extra weight affected the truck's range. The results were impressive, and Conner guessed that they may have been even better if the water tank was a touch shorter, and didn't potentially impact the truck's aerodynamics so much. Note that since the Lightning is larger, the water tanks don't stick up as high, which may make a notable difference.
Fast-forward to the present, and, as they'd previously promised, Kyle and the team put the F-150 Lightning through the exact same range and efficiency test. They head out on the usual ~57-mile efficiency loop, which consists of mostly highway driving at 70 mph, though there's some city driving and a bit of traffic.
While there are many details in the video related to the truck's onboard scales, the truck thinking the load is overweight, some anxiety-inducing "wobble" from the water tanks, and more, we're going to focus in on the range and efficiency testing.
According to Jordan, the Lightning pulled off an impressive 1.8 miles per kWh. To be clear, this is only about a 5 percent reduction compared to the truck's efficiency on the same route without the extra weight.
For comparison, the Rivian R1T averaged an impressive 2 miles per kWh during the same hauling efficiency test, which was only a 0.15 mile per kWh reduction (about 7 percent) compared to the previous test during which the truck wasn't carrying any weight.
As always, once you've had a chance to watch the video in its entirety, head back here and leave us your takeaways in the comment section below. How much maximum range do you think an electric pickup truck like the F-150 Lightning should offer? Should Ford consider an even larger, third battery pack option for people who are buying the EV for longer distance towing and hauling?
