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The F-150 is in one of the markets I think ev's will take over first (small commercial vehicles) but it just was not the right vehicle to start with. To expensive, even when the tax incentives were still a thing, and Ford suffers from having corrupt dealers taking a large cut on top of that. So you are selling to either the top 5% or bigger businesses.

If you are a top 5% buying this you want it to tow your expensive toy somewhere which ev's suck at currently or you want it to drive to "insert outdoorsy vacation destination", which means long distance in a remote area with few charging stations. So not a great sell.

If you are a bigger business I think this probably makes sense in some cases. You aren't dealing with the maintenance of an ICE, you can keep it "running" inside a building, it can provide on site power, probably has cost benefits in cities where the lack of emissions and noise is helpful. But the expensive really narrows down your customers. Many are also looking for range and towing, which doesn't help, and people that would show up for the ev part probably would be better off with a van.

If they had done a small e-transit, in the $30-35k range and sold it direct for actual msrp they would have had a much better chance at dealing with where we are now (high interest rate and low support for ev's).

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My electrician drives an electric F-150, it's impressive how useful it is for him. The frunk carries a big box of tools, there's tons of outlets to charge his power tool batteries, he can even run a small welder

The F-150 is a great power bank that comes with a very useful set of 4 tires and a steering wheel for a truly portable charging experience.

I have the powerboost hybrid F-150. It does all this, can power a house with the generator, AND I can drive it through the mountain west with zero EV infrastructure at insanely high MPG for a truck. Plopped a Tune camper on the back and couldn’t ask for more.

That’s pretty cool, and I just checked the prices and it only starts at 11k dearer than the standard f150, which is less than I expected. Interesting.

What’s more insane to me as an Australian is its 50k USD starting price in America, but in Australia it starts at $149k USD as they’re only sold by third parties that do right hand drive conversions (at imo a way too high premium, 100k for that service + shipping???)

Do they sell them in "work truck" trim? (Bench seat, vinyl upholstery, rubber floor, minimal options)?

All those things can be done with the newer gas F150s minus the frunk storage.

Yeah the frunk is what makes that thing shine. The cybertruck's frunk is pathetic in comparison.

90% of F-150s are daily driver grocery-getters. That was the target for the Lightning, not truck stuff.

I live in an area that has probably >100% pick-up ownership per adult male. I've noticed that these people will not go to the grocery store on days when the weather is inclement due to the chance of the groceries getting wet. Seems like a bad vehicle for grocery runs.

My hunch is that the people who buy an F-150 for groceries are not the people interested in buying EVs. The advantage of an EV truck is solely on cost and maintenance, so the natural market is businesses looking for practical vehicles, not people who buy impractical vehicles that are costly to operate for status reasons.

Then again as I’m typing this I realize that I have a phone with a better processor than most computers on which I … browse hacker news and read email, so go figure.

Meanwhile Chevy has a 400 mile range, unknown but more than the 100 mile range the lightning has for towing and is a work truck at about 70k or something street price last I saw. Its compelling, where the lightning is not.

>90% of F-150s are daily driver grocery-getters

it's my impression that electric vehicles are 90% grocery getters, unless the drivers are young in which case it's takeout. what else would you use an electric for, commuting? when you commute, on the way home, you shop.

Which is odd because this is how they mostly marketed it on release:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42BmZ6Rgqkc

Also most people I know who use F-150s in the way you describe also typically have two children or more. It's not as if this was a segment that was particularly hard to pin down.

They just completely wiffed.

Not to speak to the rest of the topic, but focusing on direct sales:

I'm almost certain Ford would love to sell direct, but the various franchise laws in different states make it next to impossible. On top of this, dealership owners are typically quite powerful in terms of local politics, which makes such laws very difficult to overturn.

For example:

Texas: https://www.txdmv.gov/dealers/licensing/franchise

Florida: https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Disp...

California: https://www.nmvb.ca.gov/protest/protest_establish_new_fran.h...

Somehow Tesla has managed okay, Ford could if they weren’t worried about their existing dealer base.

Dear god, what about this monstrosity is supposed to be "small"?!

Seriously, people should take a look at how professionals around tye world are managing just fine with anything from a cargo bike via VW caddy to sprinters....

I think a Sprinter is going to be larger than most pickups.

That's an "american" small, lol.

> The F-150 is in one of the markets I think ev's will take over first (small commercial vehicles)

I agree that small commercial vehicles are the right prime target for electrification, but why the pick-up? I would argue that the classic van is a much more sensible small commercial vehicle than a pick-up. As a non-USian, do you mind explaining why the pick-up is so much more popular in this category? The van wins in all tests in my mind, except maybe that it's less manly?

I talk later on that I think a small ev van would have been a better entry into the market.

That being said I do love pickups, my dream car is probably the Slate if it ever gets made. I won't argue about truck over van on the merits because I think the van wins. Trucks are just cooler in the minds of americans I guess.

That's also why a number of cities here have started banning the use of newly-purchased non-electric commercial vehicles. The feasibility-impact ratio makes it an easy first step.

easier to drive, and better for hauling gross or oddly-shaped loads. Before we started taxing them out of existence, small pickups were also easier to load.

worse for storing tools and supplies. So some service techs here also prefer vans depending on their loadout. but generally it's easier to use a pickup truck for van stuff (eg locking jobsite boxes) than the reverse.

They should be cheaper than the F150 but Ford can’t figure out how to make batteries cheaply. Evs are a lot less complex, no gas engine, no transmission, no exhaust systems with hundreds of dollars of precious metal in them. It should be cheaper than a gas equivalent.

Cheaper? Not sure how. While an ICE engine does have cooling systems and fuelling systems, water pumps and fuel pumps are relatively cheap and simple devices.

An EV generally has a battery cooling system along with regenerative braking.

EVs have roughly the same mechanical things as an ICE vehicle too, HVAC, suspension, brakes, in car entertainment, heated seats. Lighting. An entire 12v subsystem to power all that stuff as well.

A good old ICE car will be cheaper to make than an EV because the powertrain is cheaper when you account for batteries. Even taking into account the gearbox you don’t need in an EV.

This isn’t a Ford problem, it’s a problem for the whole industry. EVs won’t get cheaper until battery tech evolves.

They're already pretty sparse, the only way to make it cheaper would be to ship it with a smaller battery. That's not an option because Americans are convinced they'll be left stranded if their vehicle isn't capable of driving 300+ miles at a moment's notice.

They're also adding self driving and all kinds of fancy options

> Ford suffers from having corrupt dealers

Do you mean that dealers ask for bribes to customers to deliver cars, or that customers bribe dealers to skip the waiting list, or something like that?

In many states in the United States it is illegal to buy a car directly from the manufacturer or from a dealer owned by the manufacturer. In all states it is illegal for a manufacturer with an existing independent dealer network (which is to say, every manufacturer except the EV startups) to sell directly to the customer or to open a new factory-owned dealer.

So companies like Ford can only sell what independent dealers want to sell. You can go to the dealer and ask to buy a car sitting on the lot, and the dealer can just… not sell you the car. For any price. And it is also illegal for the manufacturer to force/coerce the dealer to sell it to you.

Of course the dealer can do softer things also, like talk down the car when you test drive or talk up the benefits of other cars. Or tell you that next year’s model will be much better than this one, so you should wait.

Additionally, most dealers do not actually pay for the car until it is sold to the customer (the manufacturer offers financing to the dealer, called “floor planning”).

Independent dealers do not want to sell EVs because of the perceived loss of service revenue. So they simply offer bad deals on the car that most customers would not take. The cars sit on the dealer’s lot, but that costs the dealer nothing (see above), even though Ford wants to sell an EV and customers want to buy EVs.

Yes exactly that. Either outright via "market adjustment fees" or through mandatory addons like $5,000 in paint protection film that's "already applied, so if you don't want it you'll have to wait until we get another one of this model and we're not sure when that will be..."

Then because of the monopolies the sibling comment mentions, you can't go elsewhere.

Rivians are all over socal. I think there is a lot of demand in certain markets.

See them all the time around the greater Seattle area. The "certain market" is probably lots of extremely well paying jobs.

In NYC al the Amazon delivery trucks I see are purpose-built Rivians. And this is the hyper-frugal, penny-pinching Amazon.

The Lightning is the 10th-best-selling EV in California and the Rivian R1T is not even in the top 25. Rivian is also one of the handful of brands selling fewer vehicles so far in 2025 compared to 2024.

Wait until the R2 comes out for ~50% of the cost of an R1. They are the best EV out in terms of features and comfort and usability.

Maybe for city truck drivers.

For those that don't drive in town, noting beats gas or diesel.

Companies need to build a stepping stone truck. Dino-powered generator on an electric platform. Get most of the upside to electric performance, while getting the speed gas refilling.

> Companies need to build a stepping stone truck.

The worlds biggest electric car company made the Shark, a plug-in EV hybrid. Sold for US$40k in Australia.

https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7EnaR_9XGs

You just described the new Ramcharger.

My experience supports nearly all of this. In 2022 I decided to keep my 2019 F-150 gasser instead of getting a Lightning because the Lightning was ridiculously expensive, even though Covid kept the value of my truck close to what I paid for it. I also didn't want all the Lightning's luxury features that tend to fail and highly depreciate over time. We do >12hr drives for work & family through remote BC and I was still willing to try the EV for such trips but didn't see the payback. In hindsight it was a good choice given the actual range experienced by Lightning owners.

They have one for 34,640 EUR; happy?

https://www.ford.ie/content/dam/guxeu/ie/Documents/Pricelist...

Granted, they don't seem to sell the cheap ones in the US.

(For whatever reason you don't see these around very much, though; Citroen and Mercedes seem to dominate the niche, at least here.)

The Ford one is slightly newer than the equivalent rebranded Stellantis models.

I am considering the Transit e-Courier or the Chicken Tax variant as my next car.

It's tough if you live in a place without great EV charging infrastructure. You end up really having to strategize when/how you charge. If you ever need to make unplanned drives across town or to a neighboring city it can really screw you up. Charging stations are often poorly maintained too and out of order.

EV's still aren't practical for a lot of drivers in such places.

> "tow your expensive toy somewhere which ev's suck at currently"

Do EVs suck at towing because of battery life? I thought electric engines were often superior to comparable internal combustion engines regarding torque.

The instantaneous torque definitely helps, and EVs are often heavier which helps with stability. But if you're towing anything with significant air resistance (e.g. a boat, a caravan, a big trailer) it kills your range. The general rule of thumb is that it will cut your range in half, which depending on your original max range is ok for some use cases, but unacceptable for others.

The reason that towing affects EVs disproportionately more than ICE vehicles is because of the efficiency of EVs. It’s unintuitive but consider that with an ICE car, you have say 30% of the chemical energy of the fuel being converted to useful power. That means that per liter of gasoline burned driving, 700ml is effectively lost to waste heat. A large amount of that energy loss is a fixed cost, that is it doesn’t scale linearly with the power demand from the car.

EVs are 90% efficient at converting their chemical energy to useful work. This is a good thing in general, but it also means that drag and extra losses hurt its range much more. If 90% of the energy goes into useful power, than anything that requires 50% more power is going to almost halve the range. Whereas with an ICE engine, the high fixed losses mean that demanding 50% more power doesn’t increase fuel consumption by 50%. Pair that with the higher energy density of gasoline and you’ve got a bad comparison for EVs.

I can't think what the issue would be aside from range. One thing that stood out to me about the cybertruck is that they made huge tradeoffs to make it more aerodynamic. The only reason to do that is to increase maximum driving distance. Put a big blocky trailer behind it and suddenly the battery's maximum distance is competing with a gas tank on a much more even playing field. Regenerative braking would make up for some of that in very hilly terrain, but on level ground it just can't get out to as many of the remote areas people take their trucks to.

I really think the first obvious use case (aside from bugout vehicles) would be something like the early road rangers - driving all over a farm and bringing back crates of produce from muddy fields without getting stuck or needing a lot of maintenance.

The electric LDV and GWM utes are meant to be pretty great. I reckon they will take over everywhere else and then come for the US with a US specific model.

Yeah I might have thought that too if I didn’t own commercial vehicles. I own a few and the idea of switching to an EV for them is laughable. Go tow stuff for 8 hours one day and ask yourself “if I had to stop for 30 minutes every 90 miles how would I like this day?”

Battery ranges decline by over 50% when towing. The long term health of a battery requires you to keep it within a range of about 60% of the max capacity (ie between 20 and 80). So that’s if anything a generous estimate. You’d increase your labor cost by 25% just charging, not to mention that public charging isn’t any cheaper than fuel. I’m not even factoring in lost job profits or overtime.

The margins the Ford dealer takes are not the issue. The cost of the vehicle itself amortized by the hour is much less than the labor cost of operating it. If I could get any EV truck at the same cost as my diesel, I still wouldn’t. If you’ve got two guys out, that’s $50 burnt every time they charge (at least) and that may be 2+ times a day. Your fuel cost is irrelevant. Five minutes at a gas station and a tank of diesel is still cheaper.

It has some use cases I’m sure (delivery vans since it is one worker, city driving, short range) but most commercial vehicle work is simply not going electric given current battery technology.