Electric Tow Vehicles - Getting close

Huh? The lightning is specific to the Ford F-150 EV. It's not a trim. It's their electric version of the F-150. Which by the way is selling abysmally and prices on used ones are dropping like a fat kid on a see-saw. 

F-150 ICE's - all trim levels are selling just fine. 

that is 7000 units of one trim line of a f150.  a lot of companies would love to sell that many units in a whole family line.  you will see them scale back on the ev now to match sales.  the first three years all the people who were going to get a ev got one, now they are reliant on people weighing options and deciding if a ev suits their use case.  

A big issue with the lightning is Ford did not provide any adapters to charge it with. It was up to the purchaser to acquire them. My son bought one and they promised him an adapter for the Tesla Super Charger within 4 months, he got it well over 6 months before he got it after he found one on his own. Basically they are selling trucks without the means to practically charge them. Hard to find chargers you can plug them into the day you get it. Huge deterrent in buying one. 

He got a Tesla 1st, loved it, and had everything needed to charge it from the get go. Loved it so much he got the lightning. He loves it now, but had he bought the Ford first he would never had bought another EV again. 

What an interesting yet overtly vague and presumptuous contribution to this thread….

(On the flip side, this subject must be near and dear to many on here, as there’s been more responses to this one thread than the entire rest of the forum in the same time frame I bet.)

um, you do know BYD is the number 1 ev seller in the world, and the only reason they are not in north America is that there was a 100% tariff put against Chinese ev's by the US and Canada shortly followed along when asked to, although apparently they are in talks with Canada right now as we have to find more reliable trading partners for another 2 to 4 years at least.   you think that just happened, nope it was because ford dodge and chev don't want to have to sell there ev's for a reasonable price, or any other auto for that matter.  BYD has been selling ev's since 2008, and sell world wide.  in 2024 they sold  4,272,145 EV vehicles.  tesla also started in 2008 with the limited run of the roadster but never really offered a car for the masses until 2014 with the s model, and it was very hard to get also. 

.he fact is tesla is not a well built car, and it is the ugly winner for ev's, now we won't even bring the silver BFI bin of a truck they make into this discussion

ford makes a decently built ev's, but the North American pricing is to high.  the governments keep wanting everyone to switch to EVs to reduce emissions, ya that makes sense but, instead of manufactures coming in at a competitive price with there products to make people want to buy them, governments offer rebates and such which still keep the price up and limit ev's to people that can afford them in the first place. GM has finally released their truck so we will see how that is.  

the simple matter of fact is there is a reason things are made overseas, they are not lower quality or this or that, it is simply because American and Canadian businesses wanted to increase their profit so they moved manufacturing to lower labour cost markets.  if you want to bring manufacturing back, get rid of the stock market, share holder dividends are what drive the strive for lower manufacturing costs and higher sales prices in everything now days.

You are looking at it from a pro/con political eco-faith point of view.

I'm looking at it from the practical does the technology work, point of view. 

90% of what you mention will happen anyway weather we use electric or gas vehicles. 

I think electric vehicles are the way to go for any application except towing  or hauling but they do have a couple hurdles.  charging speed the biggest one, apparently ford has a patent for a new charge system that will charge your ev from 20% to full in 5 min.  that would be a game changer if it works, and the biggest issue of course is the price compared to the equivalent gas powered car. 

I am interested to see what happens with the talks in China right now, hopefully they remove the tariffs off of BYD and a couple other electric car makers, there premium BYD HAN has a 375+ mile range, awd, luxury interior, blows tesla out of the water with fit and finish and quality.  for me to buy this in Canada, if it was not terrified at 100% is under 30K CDN so about 24K US .  

that is ny issue with the tariffs, not talking about the ones trump has done, but tariffs in general, they use them as protection for local companies who were powerful enough to lobby the government into placing them.  this means they don't have to be as efficient, don't have to make as good as a product, and don't have to worry about competing on price point.  so ya if you want inferior vehicles at more cost, use tariffs to help make them I guess.

I agree govt mandates only distort the market and lead to bad business choices. I still can't believe they aren't pushing 100-150 mile range commuter cars (maybe 1 or 2 seaters) for $15k focused on multi-car families. At a cheap price, sold for a purpose, I think they would sell well. When they try to get 300-400mile range carrying 5+ passengers, things quickly spiral and really hold up the development. 

Honestly, for pickups, I think they tried to get too fancy. Instead of building everything new from the ground up:

 - Rip out the 500lb V8, 200lb gas tank and 200lb transmission. Otherwise, leave the truck unchanged.

 - Mate a single 200lb electric motor to the drive shaft with a higher torque motor and skip the transmission. Install 700lb of batteries (~70kwh) for a base model (no weight change to the truck). Use the 2500lb payload f150 and double the battery bank (leaving 1800lb useable payload) for 140kwh (a bit more than the extended range F150 EV). Design, tooling and manufacturing costs would be drastically cheaper as 80% of the truck is stock ICE truck. If you make the batteries modular (mounted between the frame rails), you could even offer a 210kwh option (similar to the GMC) though they might have to beef up the suspension as that would start to eat into the payload too much.

 - Might be looking at around $8k upcharge for the batteries (offset by the cost of the V8 & transmission) but now it's close enough that fuel savings could justify the cost increase.

 - Except for the electric motor & controller, everything is stock, so any mechanic familiar with an F150 can work on the suspension and other components. 

For RVs, of course, cost needs to come down but the Ford EV is comparable cost to it's ICE 1/2 tons. The issue is it's only about 60% of the range of the GM EV 1/2 ton and not practical for towing.

Yes, he was towing a very tiny trailer and was accepting of very low range/lots of charging stops. It as possible but for a very tiny percentage of RVers.

Setting aside the up front cost, this is getting to be practical. Pulling typical size trailers for typical daily distances. It's not going to replace diesel dullys but lots of 1/2 ton trucks pulling 18-25ft 3000-7000lb trailers. 

Officially, it's rated at 460 miles with the bigger battery pack, so 230miles towing sounds plausible. 

Not saying it's practical for everyone but honestly, most people don't boondock at all, so that cuts maybe 5-10% of the market. Compared to a few years back when it was limited to tear drops who don't cover many miles per day, this would accommodate a fairly sizable percentage of RVers.

Actually, if you can find a fast charger within say 50miles of where you boondock, it could be an improvement. The truck has an outlet/inverter that could handle the aircon. Charge up, 50 miles to the site, use 50miles worth of battery to run the aircon for the weekend and 50 miles back to the charge station with a 25% margin of error.

I agree cost is still a big stumbling block but just 2-4 yrs ago, even if you were willing to pay the cost, it was practical for maybe 5% of the market. I would guess it's up to 30-40% of the market that would have negligible impacts to how they travel.

ya haha.. I took a mustang EV for a test drive as I was going to get a EV for my 60 mile commute to work each day.  fast and handled the curves very well.  and was one of the nicest finished vehicles I have seen in a while.  I ended up getting a bronco sport, after doing the math I would only save 1500/year (max) when you included the cost of charging at home and the 35K price difference is more years than I have left to work at 1500/year