Credit: Ford

Speculations & Musings About The Ford Fathom Electric Pickup Truck

August 8, 202621 seconds Steve Hanley 0 Comments

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Here’s what we know about the new electric pickup truck coming from Ford early next year:

It will have a starting price of $28,350 (plus a delivery charge of $1,595) with the standard battery and a single motor.
Included in the price are bidirectional charging, BlueCruise, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and a digital key.
BlueCruise will be integrated with Apple Maps.
It will be called Fathom.
It will have a frunk.

That’s pretty much all we know so far. Dimensions, carrying capacity, towing capacity, range, charging speed, and optional battery sizes are all unknown at this time, which opens the door to lots of speculation. We can be pretty sure the Fathom will be smaller than the current Ranger and about the same size as the Maverick. What we don’t know is how much stuff it will hold in the cargo box, and whether there will be a pass-through between the box and the passenger compartment that allows longer items to be transported.

A Farmer’s Perspective

I was discussing all this with Dan Allard, who is a farmer in New Hampshire when he isn’t reading CleanTechnica. We started discussing what carrying cargo and hauling trailers does to the range of a vehicle. Above is a photo of Dan getting ready to deliver a load of hay using his trusty diesel-powered pickup truck and a trailer. There is no chance the Ford Fathom could handle such a task. It is not going to pull a horse trailer or deliver a ton of concrete pipe to a job site. But Dan thinks that, if it can pull a snowmobile trailer or carry a dirt bike in the cargo box, the demand for such a vehicle could be significant.

I agree. Over the years, I have owned a Ford Ranger, a Mazda B2600i, a Dodge Ram 50 (made by Mitsubishi), and a Chevy S-10 pickup truck. None was a daily driver, but each was called upon to carry and tow more stuff than it was ever designed for. The one thing that was true for all of them is that when hauling a trailer, gas mileage was significantly reduced.

Dan says his Duramax uses about 20 percent more fuel when making deliveries. My friend who hauls a large camping trailer behind his F-150 gets 20 mpg on the highway, but that drops to as little as 8 mpg with camper hooked up. I think if the range for the Ford Fathom only falls by 20 percent while towing or hauling stuff, that will be a triumph. Based on anecdotal evidence involving the Rivian R1T, owners can expect range to fall by as much as 40 percent when the Fathom is called upon to perform heavy-duty chores.

According to The Drive, Rivian says any decrease is more strongly associated with added wind resistance than with added weight. That should come as no surprise. The key to all electric vehicles is efficiency. Anything that reduces it will exact a toll when it comes to range.

My 2017 Chevy Bolt has a 65 kWh battery and a range of about 250 miles. Since a gallon of gasoline has 33.7 kWh of energy, that means my Bolt is expected to travel that far on the equivalent of two gallons of gas. Obviously, it needs to be a very efficient package in order for that to happen. It almost seems impossible until you realize that an electric motor is usually more than 90 percent efficient while a typical infernal combustion engines wastes as much as 80 percent of the energy contained in the fuel it consumes.

My guess is the standard battery for the Fathom will be somewhere around 65 kWh, with a range of about 220 miles. A larger battery of about 85 kWh with a range of about 300 miles will be optional.

A Sanctimonious Tirade

The so-called president last week dissed electric car owners in a speech in Las Vegas. “You ever see the signs? You’re driving along in an electric car? They have a disease, you know, it’s a disease where it’s called, like, they get screwed up, they’re driving, and they realize their battery’s getting low and they start thinking about it when it’s three quarters full, it loses a little bit and they say, where am I gonna [charge]? And you’re driving down the highway and you’ll see a sign ‘electric charging station’ with an arrow ’89 miles to the right.’ These people are crazy,” Trump said. That’s the sort of mindset Ford will be selling into with its newest electric vehicle. It’s going to be a struggle no matter how good the Fathom is. [Editor’s note: I find it sort of funny that Trump apparently couldn’t remember the term “range anxiety,” so just rambled on about it for a minute. –Z.S.]

The Japanese started the mini truck craze. Both Datsun and Toyota brought them to the US and they were hugely popular. Ford countered with the Courier, GM imported the Chevy L’UV built by Isuzu, and Mazda even had a truck powered by a rotary engine. Those small trucks allowed Americans to carry stuff without crapping up the family car. They rode like buckboards, but they got great gas mileage compared to the full size pickups from the Big Three.

Soon the boffins in the industry figured out that people really like bigger, bolder trucks that are more about intimidation than practicality, and were willing to pay twice the price of a normal sedan to get one. The quest for profits led to bigger and taller trucks, to the point that today people need a step ladder to reach items in the front of the load bed. The Fathom is intended to reverse the “bigger is better” trend while still making money. Let’s hope that works out for Ford.

What’s In A Name?

Already, much has been written about the name Ford chose for its new truck. Some people love it; others hate it. I am in the latter camp. Companies like Volkswagen and Mercedes started on the road to the EV future by giving their electric vehicles all new names — ID this, EQ that. Then they discovered that people have a deep connection to the brands they know and trust, and so they have embraced their legacies by bringing back labels like Polo, Golf, and C-Class. Sales data seem to suggest that was a smart move.

“Fathom?” Sorry, no one knows what that means. In my unbidden opinion, Ford would have done itself a favor by dusting off a brand name from its corporate library — Ranchero, for instance, or even Courier. Falcon could have been re-used (but definitely not Pinto!). Sometimes marketing types get carried away with their analytics, and this would seem to be one of those occasions. Here is a video from Ford that hints at what the people who designed the Fathom thought its target audience would be.

The Competition

The Slate electric truck will be a direct competitor to the Fathom, at a starting price thousands of dollars less. But the Slate is a bare bones offering. Adding a few options will easily get it up to the price of the Fathom or higher. Plus, Ford has been manufacturing vehicles for well over a century. Slate has yet to produce its first truck.

The proposed truck from Volkswagen’s new Scout division also shows promise. Although, pricing will likely be significantly higher than for the Fathom. What is interesting is that pre-orders for the Scout have been trending heavily toward the plug-in hybrid option rather than the full battery electric version. So far as we know, Ford has no plans for a plug-in hybrid version of the Fathom, but it is likely the company has considered such a thing. Demand for the PHEV version of the Maverick has exceeded all expectations. Every manufacturer seems to be considering ways to straddle the ongoing anxiety over range and charging.

In the absence of hard information, speculation is all we have to work with. For the owner who wants to tote some gear now and then, the Fathom may be just the ticket. Ford is pitching the Fathom as a vehicle for those who enjoy an active lifestyle — campers, climbers, kayakers, and mountain bikers, for instance. Expect the typical Fathom to cost around $45,000 out the door with the larger battery, dual motors, an option package or two, and an EPA range of around 301 miles. Check back with us next year to see how accurate our crystal ball was. Hopefully, our projections are within one standard deviation of the actual numbers.

There are no official photos of the Fathom yet, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it will look like from the videos available online, like the one below.

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