I recently interviewed Aaron Smith, CEO of the Energy and Environmental Building Alliance (EEBA), about his new Ford F-150 Lightning and also his Ford Mustang Mach-E. There are a lot of fun notes and takeaways regarding these electric vehicles in the one-hour podcast, but probably the items that jumped out to me the most were that Aaron was already using the Lightning’s vehicle-to-load capability, how much that was able to cover, and how quickly that feature spread to neighbors and got them requesting help. (How many of those neighbors will consider a Ford F-150 Lightning now and be converted to electric driving thanks to the vehicle-to-load and vehicle-to-home capabilities of the truck?)
Before talking about the brand new F-150 Lightning, though, we talked about Aaron’s experience with his first Ford electric vehicle, the Mustang Mach-E! The Mach-E is one of my favorite electric vehicles, and Aaron and I geeked out on details regarding the drive quality, the touchscreen, the design, the autonomous driving features (Ford’s BlueCruise suite), and more.
Getting to the truck, there’s the power, the similar touchscreen, the capability as a normal pickup truck, and the truly customer-grabbing V2X capabilities. However, for long-distance driving — and especially towing — on the Interstate, it is admittedly not the best vehicle on the market. But that’s a tradeoff that’s not hard to live with in many cases, especially with another vehicle in the household for such trips.
Aaron highlighted a couple of other things that make a tremendous financial case for the F-150 Lightning. First of all, he was spending about $200 a week on gas with his previous truck, so the Lightning is saving him a boatload of money and practically paying for itself in gas savings! Secondly, the V2X capability (yes, I’m returning to that one more time) is essentially like having 7 Tesla Powerwalls! How much is a Powerwall again?
Anyway, listen to the whole podcast for much more detail and nuance.
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