Ford F-150 Lightning

[EVP]

The new Lightning would smoke the old supercharged SVT one. The electric does 0-60 in 4.0 seconds vs 5.2 for the old one and can tow twice as much.

I would hope so.


Towing? The people who want to tow would not be interested in a Lightning. That’s kinda my point. There is nothing wrong with having a electric truck that is a crew cab but that’s a far away from what Ford Lightning’s were. It has been watered down.


Ford has plenty of awesome motors that the could do a Ford Lightning right. Make it lightweight single cab, short bed and put the super snake engine in it. That would be more like a Ford lightning.

[rob_s]

I've said this before, maybe even in this thread, but I don't get why people get so worked up about old vehicle names getting re-used. Even when the new version doesn't do the old one justice (whether actually or perceived). it's like the folks that get worked up that a movie "is nothing like the book!"

I had a 2006 GTO that everyone hated on. Strangely, IIRC it was the fastest factory GTO ever produced (sit around and ask and old guy about his legacy performance car sometime, and get him to tell you 1/4 mile and 0-60 times, and then go google that shit. Old age really does a number on the memory!). To be fair, at least in this case it was still a V8, still a "performance" car, etc.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't really care if they call a vehicle the "purple unicorn". If it provides the features and performance I want, at a price I'm willing to pay, the name is kind of a red herring.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

As long as I can keep working from home (also as long as my wife isn't working) all vehicle purchases are on hold.

When I was working in a town half an hour south of here, I used to think about an electric truck pretty often. There were chargers a block from my work, and I live on an island that's almost exactly 300 miles top to bottom so 99% of the time the range would be fine for me.

The thing I liked least about the last truck I had was the inconvenience of getting groceries and either putting them in the bed and arriving with $100 worth of everything-smoothie, or putting them in the seat. Or tools, or musical instruments, or basically anything other than bales of hay, plywood, or motorcycles.

A truck with a frunk sounds awesome, both in the sense of having a large, lockable compartment, and in the actual physical sense of how that phrase sounds, which is like some a spoonerism that might follow the words "there once was" at the beginning of a limerick that results in an HR meeting, so I'm quite excited about that. But even if you don't have a half warmed fish for a truck with a frunk, I think most people would find that handy.



Obviously I spend a lot of time towing boats but the weight of the boat I usually tow now is so low that you can barely feel it behind my quarter-century-old, 350,000km poorly maintained 4runner, so I don't need modern truck towing capacity like I used to fantasize about. But if I do tow a heavy boat, I wouldn't be towing it that far...MOST of the time. Conceivably if I had the truck for it I could be called on to tow our rescue boat down to the big city for a refit, someone else is doing that later this week, but that wouldn't really be an issue; that whole route is the Hippie Highway and there are plenty of chargers everywhere.

However I'll post two maps of my little section of the province, which I'll point out is the California of the North and has more chargers than anywhere else in this country:



Now this is just what comes up under "charging stations near me" so below the southernmost one shown there would be ten times as many, so if I were to drag something heavy down to Victoria, sure, I'd be fine.

But here's the map of where I go any time I want to fish big water, and is consequently the most frequent spot to which I would personally tow anything heavy enough to give real thought to:




Now, I haven't put the work in to overlay the map of chargers onto the map of the route to Bamfield so I'm trusting in everyone's ability to do this transposition mentally but I think with enough effort we can conclude that charging options would be limited west of the main road. (I happen to know that there are actually two in Lake Cowichan which I think are just too new to show up on the map but that's less than a third of the way from here to Bamfield, anyway).


So here's my personal conclusion: I would seriously consider an electric truck, because where I live is like the Canadian equivalent halfway between San Luis Obispo and Monterey, maybe...not in the Bay Area, but not that far and heavily influenced by it.

BUT: even so, even on an island that I rarely leave except to go to even smaller islands, there are serious range and/or infrastructure problems that make it a much harder choice, and I don't think we're all that close to solving either.

And I think to me this is the real proof of how true it is that these are city trucks. Which is not really a criticism, exactly: the last numbers I saw had over 80% of Canadians living in urban areas. I think about the number of guys I know in trades who are 100% legit, no-frills, zero-chance-of-man-bunnery, never-had-a-fancy-coffee-in-their-lives, I-don't-care-how-much-of-a-Sam-Elliot-meme-larper-you-are-these-are-totally-real-men, who need trucks to drive around cities. Hell, if I was still subcontracting in a city I'd probably put down the 7689 Cobra Chickens for a deposit (not sure what $100 USD is in CIP at the moment but probably 7689 is close) myself.

But I think I'm the closest thing there is to an edge case where one probably wouldn't quite work, and I think it's interesting that I feel like the deck SHOULD be stacked in favour of it working, given the location and my relative proximity to green-politics nexus points. But it's still not quite functional out here in subruralurbia, or whatever this is, even though my town has at least a dozen chargers on main street, all the crosswalks are rainbows, and the town council tweets about decolonializing our history. You'd think we'd be all set for EV trucks to work perfectly but I think not quite yet.

[BehindBlueI's]

The thing I liked least about the last truck I had was the inconvenience of getting groceries and either putting them in the bed and arriving with $100 worth of everything-smoothie, or putting them in the seat. Or tools, or musical instruments, or basically anything other than bales of hay, plywood, or motorcycles.

Two of these: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-St...2387/300170479

and one of these: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Keeper-R...7059/207097432

Easy small item storage, easy to remove when you do need plywood, etc.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I did have stuff like that...but would periodically forget to lock it in the cab when I wasn't using it, and I got tired of replacing it.

[EVP]

I've said this before, maybe even in this thread, but I don't get why people get so worked up about old vehicle names getting re-used. Even when the new version doesn't do the old one justice (whether actually or perceived). it's like the folks that get worked up that a movie "is nothing like the book!"

I had a 2006 GTO that everyone hated on. Strangely, IIRC it was the fastest factory GTO ever produced (sit around and ask and old guy about his legacy performance car sometime, and get him to tell you 1/4 mile and 0-60 times, and then go google that shit. Old age really does a number on the memory!). To be fair, at least in this case it was still a V8, still a "performance" car, etc.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't really care if they call a vehicle the "purple unicorn". If it provides the features and performance I want, at a price I'm willing to pay, the name is kind of a red herring.

I don’t think people are getting worked up it’s more like a disappointed head shake. Of course the new car is going to be faster, there supposed to. You would not buy a new Camaro, mustang, corvette, 911 or whatever car and it be slower then the vehicles of old. That just don’t make sense.

[BehindBlueI's]

I did have stuff like that...but would periodically forget to lock it in the cab when I wasn't using it, and I got tired of replacing it.

I've got a folding tonneau cover and locking tailgate, so non-issue for me. It makes it basically a giant trunk and can be an open bed again in a few minutes.

[Lester Polfus]

I did have stuff like that...but would periodically forget to lock it in the cab when I wasn't using it, and I got tired of replacing it.

I've got a folding tonneau cover and locking tailgate, so non-issue for me. It makes it basically a giant trunk and can be an open bed again in a few minutes.

In my opinion, a locking tonneau cover is the sweet spot between a bare bed where people can steal your stuff and pitch their used needles (seen it happen) and a topper/camper/shell. Somebody with a crowbar could make short work of mine, but it seems to be enough of a deterrent.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

There are definitely workarounds for not having a trunk, I just never really liked any of them all that much and compared to actually having a locking trunk available as fast as you can press the button on your remote, I just don't think they compare, personally, but obviously that's just my personal preference.

[UNK]

Id say a person could have a pretty good business servicing electric chargers. I recently read in one city about half the chargers were down.