Tyler Hoover of Hoovie’s Garage fame recently posted a video showing his attempt to tow in his brand new Ford F-150 Lightning. The towing test doesn’t go especially well, since in the video Tyler doesn’t try to drive the truck conservatively, and so it uses up way more range than he expected while pulling a trailer carrying an old 1930s Ford pickup.
He has now followed it up and admits his video went viral because it had a negative headline about a truck that performed below expectations, pointing to similar videos that showed the Lightning performing much better in a towing test that had far fewer views. He explains that since there was an element of clickbait to his headline and thumbnail (and the words “Fail” or "Disaster"), the video was even picked up by news outlets.
Some of these publications had political leanings and ended up spinning the information presented by Tyler to promote their own agendas, although they did not distort. Tyler says he believes his video got one of the biggest pushes after it was featured on Info Wars and Alex Jones actually reacted to the video live during his show, although he didn’t really seem to get any of the facts straight.
It was pretty clear Jones wanted to bash the F-150 Lightning, and he was willing to resort to made-up facts that Tyler Hoover never even alluded to in his video. Yes, it was a video where the Lightning lost range a lot quicker than the host was expecting and this made him declare the towing test a failure, but he never criticizes the trucks torque or performance.
In fact, the video is mostly positive, and the F-150 Lightning made the load it was hauling feel insignificant as it didn’t really seem to dent its performance. Ford has been in contact with Tyler and he reportedly apologized to the manufacturer for publishing the video and framing everything the way he did.
We reached out to Ford for comments and will update this article when we hear back.
