If you followed along with our broken Porsche Cayman cross-country roadtrip thread, you already know I bought a lightly used F-150 Lightning. But I figured it deserved its own build thread instead of living buried in the Cayman comments. This hopefully won't be a project, so instead I'll be documenting what it's like to live with an electric truck.
Let's get the worst part out of the way: In June 2023, I paid just over $64,000 including the dealer fees/games/etc. That's just barely less than I paid for my house.... That bought me a 2022 F-150 Lightning XLT Extended Range with $22,000 of options and 6000 miles. And, honestly, I wanted all the bells and whistles. I figured if I'm going into debt to buy a truck, it might as well be nice. Original MSRP was $77,269, but Ford just announced price cuts so in theory this truck would now cost just under $70k brand new.
Yes, that's too expensive. Yes, I paid a premium to have an electric truck a few years before they become common. Yes, it will depreciate. Ultimately, my decision came down to this: In a world where similar gas-powered F-150s are $50,000, I spent a little bit more to buy the best new car I've ever driven. And I mean that. That, and I saved the expense of a separate whole-house generator installation.
I picked the truck up in Texas, then immediately drove it home to Florida. Here's the summary I posted in the other thread:
I took the lightning on a worst-case scenario for EVs: An 1150-mile all-highway trip across a part of the country that has some of the least-developed charging infrastructure anywhere.
And, honestly, it wasn't that big of a deal. But it could have been a total non-issue with a few tweaks.
In total, I spent $88 and 4.08 hours charging across two days and 1150 miles. Honestly, I'd struggle to do this drive without four hours of stops in a gas truck, anyway. I charged five times total, but one of these was a false start at a slow charger, and I left after a few minutes. So that's two charging stops per day. Note that I'm not counting the slow charge to 75% I took at the hotel--it was free and I would have parked at the hotel overnight, anyway.
First, let's talk charger locations: The furthest I traveled off the highway for a charger was 12 miles. But that's only because my preferred charger (.7 miles off the highway) was broken, and the one I ended up at was just off a different highway. Every other charger was so close to the highway, I could see them while taking the exit. Most chargers are in a Walmart parking lot, which meant it was easy to find food/restrooms/etc. while waiting.
Second, let's talk charging time: The longest I charged was 1 hour 16 minutes. The second longest was 1 hour 5 minutes. These stops could have been way shorter, as I spent a disproportionate amount of time charging from 80% full to 90% full. But I had to charge all the way in order to bridge broken chargers along the route. In a world with reliable chargers, I could have saved about an hour from my trip. And a 45-minute charge also meshes better with how long of a break I like to take twice a day.
Third, let's talk charger reliability: Every single charger I stopped at had multiple broken stations, and all but one delivered less than the promised power. And this was the result with homework--there's an app for charger reviews called PlugShare that's basically charge yelp, and I used it to avoid the worst-reviewed stations along the route. When you put a destination into the truck's nav system, it automatically forecasts battery usage along the route, then picks appropriate chargers and adds them as stops. But it doesn't really read the charger reviews (just an average of the score), so the truck's recommendations would have been far slower. If most of the chargers that currently exist actually worked, then this trip would have been a total non-issue.
So what's my verdict? Honestly: Not that big of a deal. Electrify America's stations are hot garbage, but at the end of the day I did a massive trip in a really inefficient EV without significant hassle. I'm pretty impressed with how far we've come since my Nissan LEAF.
And with that, let the build thread begin. Hopefully what follows is 20 years of productive discussion as I run my new electric truck into the ground. Let's see!
