My Lightning owner's thoughts and 1600 mile trip

[romeoz]

These are just my thoughts and driving experiences on the new Ford Lightning Lariat Extended Range. I started off flying down on a Friday evening to San Antonio, TX from Maryland to get my truck. I got it Saturday morning and my trip began. We stopped about every 100 miles, if I didn’t we would have been stranded because charging stations are not that close. I give props to TESLA for doing this right! We first put our destination into the MAP on the Ford screen and it had chargers everywhere. When I started to look more into this, I noticed it was having me stop as a destination charger, which would have been 10+ hours to charge. Another thing I give TESLA props to is the charging navigation. I wish Ford could have worked something out with Elon Musk to utilizing their supercharging networks and allow the truck to charge faster than 150kWh and to use their software, hands down Ford has a long way to go with the UI, but it’s early so this is to be expected.

I started off with 315 miles of charge, about 4 hrs later it went down to 216 at 100% charge rate, we drove between 75 and 80 mph. I was not bothered by this because it was a true reflection to what miles I would be getting if I drove nonstop. You can reset the trip status and go back to 315 but I liked the fact I didn’t have to guess how far I could go during my trip. Charging with electrify America sucks to be honest, rates were .43 cents a minute to charge and the lightning charges super slow. The free 250 kWh hours Ford gives was gone within a few hours of my trip. Myself and my brother took turns driving because we needed to be back to work on Monday. Truck ran smooth, no issues at all, my biggest complaint was the slow charging, I guess even though we were at 350 kWh we were only able to charge at 150kWh max and even the highest rate I saw, when I was down to 10% was 116kWh, this sucked as I usually drive a tesla and that thing charges crazy fast compared to the truck. At one point it was about 3 am and I wanted to charge to 80% to get back on the road ,I ended up falling asleep a little longer than I wanted, set alarm for 1 hr but I guess the time change happened and it was 2 hrs later, I actually woke up around 1 hr and 45 min into the 2 hr alarm and my charging was at 94% and my current charge was around $38.70. After about 80% charge the charging speeds dopes to almost a crawl, this just racks up the charging bill and is not worth charging anything after 80%. I tried to stay around this but since I was driving around 1600 miles cross country I needed to sometimes extend my range to get to the next stop, example 196 miles away. Since the Ford UI was nonexistence for our trip, we would use the Electrify America app to plot our next stopping point, which was around 100 miles later. This was frustrating because I am used to putting in my trip into the navigation (telsa) and it tells me where to stop.

The frequent stops were nice as it gave us a chance to stretch and relax for 45 min while it charged another 120 miles of range. Yes, 45 min to charge just to get to the next stop which was about a little less than 2 hrs away. Our total trip was 33 hrs total and it cost about $180.00 to charge minus my free 250kWh from Ford. I can’t complain about the $180.00 as my Raptor cost $189.00 to from E to F and I could get about 500 miles of range on the interstate. Overall the truck is great, I wish the charging speeds were faster as I am very hesitant to ever take this truck on a long road trip again, until Ford ups the charging speeds and adds more charging stations to the network. I did put it into sport mode and launched off the line, I don’t like that the tires chirp and the power was not there for me. I read and watched videos and heard people say how amazing the speed was 0-60 but I assume these were from people that have never been in a tesla because the speed is definitely not there, but it could be all the hype was so much online and I expected more. The blue cruise worked flawlessly, it has a learning curve on how to use it but once I figured that out it just worked. I drove around 80% of my trip on hands free blue cruise, not one time did I experience a phantom braking, which my tesla does often while in FSD. I liked the hands-off feature but anytime I looked down at the cluster or main screen the truck yelled to look ahead. I was telling my brother I wish Tesla would give us more hands off in FSD but at least with Tesla I can put one hand on the steering wheel and glance away for a second and not get yelled at by the car. So maybe I would choose to keep my hands on the steering wheel vs hands-off if it meant I could move my eyes around more, just a thought. The regen braking worked awesome but I am familiar with it on my Tesla so no complaints there.

I am home now and I park the Lightning next to my Raptor. It’s Friday and I have driven the truck 1 time. I am using my Telsa 50 Amp mobile charger to charge my truck up after my first trip and it took about 14 hrs to charge. Ever since I moved to MD and with my commute being longer, I parked my Raptor and started driving my tesla more now. I can get to work and back and charge at night for about 32kWh @ $3.84. The one day I drove my Lightning I had to charge back 58kWh and that cost $6.96. The truck is going to cost almost double to drive than my tesla but that is to be expected since it’s a lot heavier. I walk outside and see my Lightning but next to it sits my Raptor, I wish Ford would have made an electric Raptor or at least added some beefier tires and body panels. The Lightning looks like a base model F150 honestly. I’m adding a 2” leveling kit on Monday and some 305/55/20 KO2’s, hopefully this will give me the look I want and I might start driving it more. This was not my first choice as I do have the Cyber Truck on reservation, and 100% when it does come out I will be selling the Lightning when I get my Cyber Truck. Ford has done a good job but they have a lot of growing to do when it comes to the EV world. Of course, my opinions are just that, opinions, but coming from a person who has been driving a tesla for about 4 years now, we get very spoiled with the UI, performance and charging stations if needed!

Overall, I am still on the fence with the looks of the truck and the UI. My wife asked why I am not driving it more, I really wanted an electric truck and I think if I sold my Raptor I might not have to look at it when I walk outside and feel more inclined to drive the Lightning. We will see Monday after my modifications are done to the Lightning if I enjoy it more. I really hope I do but as of now if I had to choose which truck to drive, hands down its my Raptor over the Lightning because it just looks better. Side note, I am looking to trade in my Raptor for a new one and the dealership I was talking to yesterday offered to buy my Lightning for 125k, even if I didn’t buy the new Raptor from them!

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[vandy1981]

Thanks for the writeup. Did you keep track of driving speeds, charging speeds in kW and efficiency? It's hard to get an objective sense of the performance without those details.

Would recommend looking at A Better Route Planner if you road trip the F150L in the future. It's a must-have app for non-tesla EVs. Also, EA has a subscription plan that would have saved you a lot of money on your trip.

 

[Skidrowe]

I'm glad I've never owned a Tesla. Without having been spoiled by more mature technology, I'll probably be more accepting of my Lightning when I get it. Thanks for the review!

 

[TRP]

Tesla is about, what..10-12yrs ahead of the rest with their network. They should be more plentiful.

CCS will get better with time. I recommend Electrify America Pass+ too. It gives you a pretty good discount per charge for only $4 per month. You'll pay for a whole year after just a few charge sessions

 

[greenne]

First, thanks for the review. It always good to see the reviews with the good, the bad, the ugly. No product is perfect.

However most of these surprises shouldn't be surprises if the product was researched beforehand. The lack of charging stations(compared to Tesla) is well known. The charging speed has been discussed extensively.

Although its interesting to see so many comparisons to Tesla, it not really a fair comparison since Tesla does not have a Cybertruck anywhere close to market at this time.

 

[millim]

Thanks for the great write-up. I can appreciate it was especially tough given the route you were traveling may not have had the same level of infrastructure as more EV-friendly areas, but it was indeed a fair representation of your experience.

Did you consider using A Better Route Planner in conjunction w/ (or in lieu of) the integrated Ford app? If not, just for $hits and giggles, can you input your same route using ABRP and see what it would have suggested/estimated compared to your actual experience?

Since my Polestar 2 has Android Automotive I just went premium on ABRP since it actually integrates with the car (the app runs natively in the infotainment system), but either way the ability to easily add points of interest, adjust the route, be specific about charger types, etc. makes it seem like the way to go even if using the mobile app (vs. an integrated system in a car).

Edit 1 - Not sure if this generic route will load.

EDIT 2 - looks like this route was pretty much spot on w/ your 33 hours...

https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=62ebd79e-0137-49d2-b838-930fde312ec9

 

[Vorador]

These are just my thoughts and driving experiences on the new Ford Lightning Lariat Extended Range. I started off flying down on a Friday evening to San Antonio, TX from Maryland to get my truck. I got it Saturday morning and my trip began. We stopped about every 100 miles, if I didn’t we would have been stranded because charging stations are not that close. I give props to TESLA for doing this right! We first put our destination into the MAP on the Ford screen and it had chargers everywhere. When I started to look more into this, I noticed it was having me stop as a destination charger, which would have been 10+ hours to charge. Another thing I give TESLA props to is the charging navigation. I wish Ford could have worked something out with Elon Musk to utilizing their supercharging networks and allow the truck to charge faster than 150kWh and to use their software, hands down Ford has a long way to go with the UI, but it’s early so this is to be expected.

I started off with 315 miles of charge, about 4 hrs later it went down to 216 at 100% charge rate, we drove between 75 and 80 mph. I was not bothered by this because it was a true reflection to what miles I would be getting if I drove nonstop. You can reset the trip status and go back to 315 but I liked the fact I didn’t have to guess how far I could go during my trip. Charging with electrify America sucks to be honest, rates were .43 cents a minute to charge and the lightning charges super slow. The free 250 kWh hours Ford gives was gone within a few hours of my trip. Myself and my brother took turns driving because we needed to be back to work on Monday. Truck ran smooth, no issues at all, my biggest complaint was the slow charging, I guess even though we were at 350 kWh we were only able to charge at 150kWh max and even the highest rate I saw, when I was down to 10% was 116kWh, this sucked as I usually drive a tesla and that thing charges crazy fast compared to the truck. At one point it was about 3 am and I wanted to charge to 80% to get back on the road ,I ended up falling asleep a little longer than I wanted, set alarm for 1 hr but I guess the time change happened and it was 2 hrs later, I actually woke up around 1 hr and 45 min into the 2 hr alarm and my charging was at 94% and my current charge was around $38.70. After about 80% charge the charging speeds dopes to almost a crawl, this just racks up the charging bill and is not worth charging anything after 80%. I tried to stay around this but since I was driving around 1600 miles cross country I needed to sometimes extend my range to get to the next stop, example 196 miles away. Since the Ford UI was nonexistence for our trip, we would use the Electrify America app to plot our next stopping point, which was around 100 miles later. This was frustrating because I am used to putting in my trip into the navigation (telsa) and it tells me where to stop.

The frequent stops were nice as it gave us a chance to stretch and relax for 45 min while it charged another 120 miles of range. Yes, 45 min to charge just to get to the next stop which was about a little less than 2 hrs away. Our total trip was 33 hrs total and it cost about $180.00 to charge minus my free 250kWh from Ford. I can’t complain about the $180.00 as my Raptor cost $189.00 to from E to F and I could get about 500 miles of range on the interstate. Overall the truck is great, I wish the charging speeds were faster as I am very hesitant to ever take this truck on a long road trip again, until Ford ups the charging speeds and adds more charging stations to the network. I did put it into sport mode and launched off the line, I don’t like that the tires chirp and the power was not there for me. I read and watched videos and heard people say how amazing the speed was 0-60 but I assume these were from people that have never been in a tesla because the speed is definitely not there, but it could be all the hype was so much online and I expected more. The blue cruise worked flawlessly, it has a learning curve on how to use it but once I figured that out it just worked. I drove around 80% of my trip on hands free blue cruise, not one time did I experience a phantom braking, which my tesla does often while in FSD. I liked the hands-off feature but anytime I looked down at the cluster or main screen the truck yelled to look ahead. I was telling my brother I wish Tesla would give us more hands off in FSD but at least with Tesla I can put one hand on the steering wheel and glance away for a second and not get yelled at by the car. So maybe I would choose to keep my hands on the steering wheel vs hands-off if it meant I could move my eyes around more, just a thought. The regen braking worked awesome but I am familiar with it on my Tesla so no complaints there.

I am home now and I park the Lightning next to my Raptor. It’s Friday and I have driven the truck 1 time. I am using my Telsa 50 Amp mobile charger to charge my truck up after my first trip and it took about 14 hrs to charge. Ever since I moved to MD and with my commute being longer, I parked my Raptor and started driving my tesla more now. I can get to work and back and charge at night for about 32kWh @ $3.84. The one day I drove my Lightning I had to charge back 58kWh and that cost $6.96. The truck is going to cost almost double to drive than my tesla but that is to be expected since it’s a lot heavier. I walk outside and see my Lightning but next to it sits my Raptor, I wish Ford would have made an electric Raptor or at least added some beefier tires and body panels. The Lightning looks like a base model F150 honestly. I’m adding a 2” leveling kit on Monday and some 305/55/20 KO2’s, hopefully this will give me the look I want and I might start driving it more. This was not my first choice as I do have the Cyber Truck on reservation, and 100% when it does come out I will be selling the Lightning when I get my Cyber Truck. Ford has done a good job but they have a lot of growing to do when it comes to the EV world. Of course, my opinions are just that, opinions, but coming from a person who has been driving a tesla for about 4 years now, we get very spoiled with the UI, performance and charging stations if needed!

Overall, I am still on the fence with the looks of the truck and the UI. My wife asked why I am not driving it more, I really wanted an electric truck and I think if I sold my Raptor I might not have to look at it when I walk outside and feel more inclined to drive the Lightning. We will see Monday after my modifications are done to the Lightning if I enjoy it more. I really hope I do but as of now if I had to choose which truck to drive, hands down its my Raptor over the Lightning because it just looks better. Side note, I am looking to trade in my Raptor for a new one and the dealership I was talking to yesterday offered to buy my Lightning for 125k, even if I didn’t buy the new Raptor from them!

Pretty much if you are not driving a Tesla, you need to plan your route in advance. That means using something like ABRP and checking Plugshare to see if stations are broken. The Lightning maxes out at 170 kw from what I've seen from other videos, but EA is unreliable, so I'm not that surprised you got slow speeds. Also as someone else mentioned, you could have signed up for 1 month of the EA membership, and got a 20% discount on the charging rate.

 

[LightningShow]

I appreciate the write-up, always good to get feedback from a real owner.

One thing i would say is that if you’re roadtripping with the Lightning try to spend as much time as possible in the 0-50% state of charge range. If you’re doing 100 miles per stop try to charge just enough to get yourself to the next station with under 10% charge, 1%if you’re bold .

If the charger is delivering 150kW, you should be able to charge from under 5% to 50% in ~25minutes. That will get you ~100 miles at 1.6mi/kwh.

Another strategy is to work in the 0-80% range but only charge to 80% every other charger (every 200 miles). 80% won’t get you 200 miles at 80mph, but you would stop after 100 miles (probably around 30% charge) and charge back to 50%, should be ~10 minutes, then at the 200 mile mark you go all the way to 80 which would be ~50 minutes. You spend more time charging this way but only have an extended stop every 200 miles (about 60 minutes vs 50 minutes every 200 miles).

There’s no way around the fact that roadtripping in a Lightning is going to need to be more strategic than a Tesla. It’s not a long distance roadtripper but if it’s your only vehicle it’s something you have to live with. I plan on it being my only vehicle so i’ve been thinking about this a lot.

 

[greenne]

I appreciate the write-up, always good to get feedback from a real owner.

One thing i would say is that if you’re roadtripping with the Lightning try to spend as much time as possible in the 0-50% state of charge range. If you’re doing 100 miles per stop try to charge just enough to get yourself to the next station with under 10% charge, 1%if you’re bold .

If the charger is delivering 150kW, you should be able to charge from under 5% to 50% in ~25minutes. That will get you ~100 miles at 1.6mi/kwh.

Another strategy is to work in the 0-80% range but only charge to 80% every other charger (every 200 miles). 80% won’t get you 200 miles at 80mph, but you would stop after 100 miles (probably around 30% charge) and charge back to 50%, should be ~10 minutes, then at the 200 mile mark you go all the way to 80 which would be ~50 minutes. You spend more time charging this way but only have an extended stop every 200 miles (about 60 minutes vs 50 minutes every 200 miles).

There’s no way around the fact that roadtripping in a Lightning is going to need to be more strategic than a Tesla. It’s not a long distance roadtripper but if it’s your only vehicle it’s something you have to live with. I plan on it being my only vehicle so i’ve been thinking about this a lot.

I'm not sure the 0-50% plan is that effective with the Lightning. True, the lightning charging curve does dip slightly from 150KW to 125KW from 50%-70(ish)%...but that's not going to cut a whole lot of time in the grand scheme of things. I would argue you'd lose any gain by possibly adding another stop..time to drive off highway to station, log in/boot up time, etc.

Since the curve is pretty much flat 0-80%, I'd just charge it to 80% unless you need to leave or the speed isn't up to 125-150Kw. Why take a chance on another charger being slow or broken?

(this is a different strategy than you'd use with an EV with a really high peak and dropoff at 50%)

 

[Regular150]

So as a Not Psychologist, your feelings of inadequacy when your Lightning, or any other truck for that matter, is sitting next to a Raptor are a normal side affect of owning a Ford Raptor.

You are abusing yourself just having both at the same house, but parked next to each other?

Raptors like, Hey, Cute EV Pickup, you really not going to drive that when you own me are you?

 

[Theo1000]

I just did a road trip to Indiana and back and the lightning road trips just fine. I experimented a bit and the road tripping sweet spot for me was driving at 68 mph on blue cruise. Got an easy 2.3 m/kwh with a slight head wind @ 84f. EA was fairly reliable but has to be check on plug-share to see which station is getting above 150kw. This proved critical to charge times.

At that speed I was able to skip ahead to every alternate EA station. 30 minutes from about 25% SoC to 80% + Burn the next 200 miles, rinse repeat. It was a very relaxed stress free drive. I did 420 miles in just over 6.5 hours so non-stop his 1600 mile trip could have dropped under 30 hours, admittedly this strategy may not have worked in certain sections. The Lightnings long steady curve has some real road tripping potential.

I think in slightly cooler weather better performance can be pulled off. If I turned off the AC I could have saved some more time. Also I arrived home with 103 miles remaining. I could have cut the final charge a bit closer but I don't like dropping below 20%.

 

[personalt]

I in the crowd that if I needed to go 1600 mile I would fly (which of course you cant do when purpose is to pick up truck). That being said I did some 'fake' routes and found fairly good success for single day driving trips - ie not driving through night.

1)Start trip at 7am
2)20 min pee break stop
3)Maybe second 20 minute pee break stop
4)Get to lunch.. 40 minute lunch. stop
5)One more pee break 20 minute stop.
6)dinner break ~40 minutes
7)one more pee break stop
Somewhere around here you get near empty around 8pm. Call it wrap there and destination charge to 100% and start the day fresh. .

Something like this I charted hitting about 700 miles for the day with the stops being fairly natural for someone that has a regular bladder. Its when after dinner you try to drive through night that you start to spend a less natural amount of charging.

 

[watchdoc]

I've learned from from my Nissan Leaf +, "it's always faster to drive slower". Driving 60-65 and charging less gets you there faster.

 

[sotek2345]

I will be trading my Raptor for my Lightning so I won't have to see them side by side (except at the dealer), but I really like the Lightning looks. It is a street truck, not an off road brawler like the Raptor.

Just need to add a little vinyl to spice it up!

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