 This is the F-150 Lightning. It's Ford's first EV truck and the first full-size EV truck on the market. The Rivian R1T is just a little bit smaller. An EV F-150 is a big deal. The F-150 has been America's best-selling vehicle for over 40 years, so an electric F-150 is an important step towards electrifying all cars. It's also a big deal for Ford, which has to continue building out its charging network to support the Mustang Mach-E and now the F-150, figure out what to do with all of the software inside of these cars, and generally rethink what the F-150 means in an EV world. Now, I talk to a lot of car CEOs on the Decoder podcast, and they all say this thing. It's almost like you start with a white sheet of paper. We call it MBOS, Mercedes-Benz Operating Systems. A car today already is ten times more complex than a smartphone. It has ten times more lines of code than a smartphone. That's again as well not just simply making a computer on wheels. We're going to a fully-networked vehicle soon, like you said, a computer on wheels. Now, there are a million great videos about these new F-150s and even the Lightning that show off all of its features. I'm not going to out-quirk Doug DeMiro. Quirks and features! Instead, let's review this thing like a smartphone, because if that's the goal, we should figure out how close we are to it. So there's my pickup truck, charging on the range. One of the big advantages and disadvantages for Ford is that it already makes and sells a lot of F-150s, so it can keep the cost of the Lightning down by using a lot of F-150 parts in it. Literally, Ford doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. This is the F-150 steering wheel. These are the fancy massaging seats from the high-end F-150 trims. Ford did not have to spend any time rethinking the very concept of windshield wipers. The power tailgate is the same. The step and the tailgate is the same as Ford has been shipping for years and years. The neat shifter that folds down so you can make a work surface for your laptop? Yeah, it's the same as the new F-150s. By the way, I've seen a million videos of this shifter. None of them point out how loud it is. All those reused parts means that Ford can keep the costs of the Lightning down, since it's already scaled production of those parts way up. The base Lightning Pro, which is designed to be a work truck, starts at a little over $46,000 after a recent price hike. The XLT trim, which is a standard consumer model, starts at a little under $60,000. Our review unit is a top-of-the-line Platinum, which has every luxury option you can think of and a sticker price of $96,874, which is about $10,000 more than a similarly optioned gas F-150 Platinum. Those are Ford's manufacturer-suggested retail prices, though. Dealers have been marking the Lightning way, way up. We'll get to that. The big differences from the regular F-150 apart from the drivetrain are really the frunk, which is gigantic and attracts attention everywhere you open it, the portrait infotainment screen, and these light bars in the front and back. By the way, I gotta say, this front light bar is not my favorite. It kinda just looks like white plastic in the daytime, and it lights up pretty dimly with some uneven spots. The red one in the back looks way better. You add all this up, and it means the Lightning is very much an F-150. It's a F-150 Raptor, and there's a lot of familiar vibes here. In many ways, that's a good thing. The F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America, and getting F-150 owners into an EV that feels otherwise familiar might speed up the rate of EV adoption. But in other big ways, all that F-150 tradition is holding this thing back. Letting it more dramatically break away from other F-150s might have made some parts of it a little easier to use. Let's start with the center screen here, which is really the big interior difference between a regular F-150 and the Lightning. Regular F-150s have a 12-inch landscape center screen running Ford SYNC 4. The Lightning has a 15.5-inch portrait center screen running SYNC 4A, just like the Mustang Mach-E. Problem with SYNC 4 is that I'm not sure how much of a future it has. Ford signed a big deal with Google to replace the SYNC 4A with a smaller, more modern, and more modern-looking Android. They're going to integrate Google services like Google Maps. So what we're looking at now is not the future in the near term or the long term. And so I don't want to be too critical of it, but then I use it and I'm pretty critical of it. Let's take a look. SYNC 4A is really the same as SYNC 4 with the addition of these cards here, which are a critical part of the SYNC 4A. SYNC 4A is really the same as SYNC 4 with the addition of these cards here, which are a cross between a recently used app switcher and widgets that let you do things like quickly switch radio presets. The screen is laid out into basically four zones. There's a menu bar area, what you might call the app area, the cards, and then the climate controls. Once you start using all this, you quickly encounter two main issues. One, the whole thing can be extremely slow. And two, this screen is wildly underused compared to how big it is. SYNC really does not want to do two things at once. So for example, here I am on the radio screen. If I want to look at the cars built in Nav, I click on this card and it opens the card. The radio completely disappears. I've got these buttons that will jump me between my presets. If I want to go look for another station or just look at my list of stations, I've got to go fully back to the radio and take the Nav away. I have no idea why I can't see both of those apps at once. And all that's made worse by the slowness. Yeah, just look at this. Why is this so slow? Why is it fighting me? Between the radio and the map or the map and the carplay is just slow. The cards is pretty slow. There are some moments, particularly in the games, where the screen feels fast and responsive, but most of the time it's slow. Gas powered F-150s have physical buttons below the screen for the climate controls. But the Lightning's portrait screen replaces all of them with touch controls. And like almost all touchscreen climate controls, they're no fun to use and way more distracting than they should be. Switching on the seat heaters requires multiple taps and swipes. Changing the fan speed is a slider control. Changing which vents are active opens a detailed render of the truck's interior, which is not all that useful. It's the same with the various cameras. I will happily admit to using all the cameras on my truck to park in tight spots and generally navigate the thing. But on the Lightning, opening the cameras takes a few taps on the screen. But as soon as the cameras open, the menu to switch between them keeps closing itself for some reason. Even though there's plenty of room on this display to just stay open all the time. This is just unnecessary clicking to me and it makes me feel like Ford hasn't thought through what should be on the screen. What controls do people need all the time they're on the screen? I mean, look at all these unlabeled icons on this huge display. This instinct to keep status information hidden from you is expressed most clearly with Blue Cruise. So now we're on the highway. This is one of the highways that Ford has mapped for Blue Cruise. It's a divided highway. When Blue Cruise works, it's great. I went on a 300 mile road trip with my wife over the weekend. We used Blue Cruise for all the highways we're on and this car happily drove itself down the highway. The car is able to drive itself hands-free here, but there's nothing in the car that would let you know that that's possible. It's not in the center navigation. It's not an instrument cluster. But if I hit cruise control on, you see it just said hands-free and it's going to drive itself just fine. The only thing I can't do is change lanes for you. So here I'm going to get in the right lane. And so I put on my signal, change lanes, drive for a little bit. It's going to sense that I stopped changing lanes. We're hands-free again. And I can just sit here and look out the window. These two sensors here are going to watch my eyes. But I'll just look away for a minute and it'll tell me to watch the road. So now I'm looking again. You can see it saw me looking and the alert went away. This is a huge improvement over your standard adaptive cruise control with Lane Assist because you don't have to have your hands on the wheel. It's not full self-driving. There's a lot of things it can't do. But it doesn't say anywhere on the display that it's in that mode. For a car with this many screens and this many pixels to spare, I think not clearly communicating what the car is doing is a huge miss. The Lightning is otherwise a terrific EV and a great truck. I did a bunch of truck stuff with it, including hauling our trash to the dump, going to Home Depot, doing all the dad things. And the Lightning handled it all with aplomb. In day-to-day use, it acts just like a regular F-150, which is a high bar and a good thing. But you press the pedal down and this thing moves. This is one of the very fastest production trucks ever made. The official 0-60 time is 4.3 seconds and car and driver tested it at just 4 seconds. That's way faster than my Raptor and enough to beat the ridiculous 700 horsepower Ram TRX in some tests. The only consistently faster truck is the Rivian R1T, which has quad motors and can go from 0-60 in 3 seconds flat. Driving a regular EV is a big change from a normal car, but driving the Lightning is a huge change from other trucks. Things this big don't usually move this fast, and the big battery and the lower center of gravity combined with the independent rear suspension keep it planted. Even over rough bumps that make the rear end of my truck bounce all over the place. This is like the easiest full-size pickup in the world to drive, and you can smoke basically anyone whenever you want. I love it. Of course, gunning the Lightning all over town eats up range, and that means you have to deal with charging it both home and out in the wild. Something tells me that this 98 Mustang is not charging at the EV charging station. When I had the Mustang Mach-E for a few days, I could get away with trying to top it off on a standard outlet, but you absolutely need a level 2 charger at home with the Lightning. The battery is huge, and trying to charge it with a standard 110 outlet netted less than 1 mile of range per hour, which might as well be nothing. Extended range Lightnings like our review unit come with Ford's 80 amp ChargeStation Pro, which requires professional installation and allows the Lightning to serve as a backup power source for your car. But since I only had a thing for a week, I just plugged Ford's 30 amp travel charger into my 240 volt dryer outlet, and it charged just fine overnight, at around 15 miles of range added per hour. Plugged into a 150 kilowatt DC fast charger, Ford says you can go from 15 to 80 percent in just 41 minutes. The Lightning does max out charging at 155 kilowatts, so hunting for the rare 300-kilo-watt charger is a lot easier than charging it with a standard charger. At 100 percent range, the Lightning reported its range at 325 miles, but that number quickly drops as you drive around, especially where I live in the mountains. You can plan trips in the FordPass mobile app and on the built-in nav, which will plot out chargers along your route. Once the system's figured out a route, the charging stops are pretty locked in though. It would be nice if the system gave you more options along the way. Right next to the dumpster. Charging on the road is mostly handled through Ford's app and charging network. The company has been building out that network since the Mach-E came out last year, and things are improving, but they're still occasionally spotty. Chargers in the Ford network can be activated on your phone, but not in the truck for some reason. I didn't have any problems using Plug-in Charge though. That automatically activates the charger and handles billing just by plugging in. Of course, you can also just pay with a credit card. And while I charged at several Electrify America stations that worked well, along the way there were the usual broken chargers and glitches in getting things started. The biggest problem with the Lightning is that it's more or less impossible to buy. While some customers are starting to get their early pre-orders and Ford is ramping production as fast as it can, CEO Jim Farley told me that Ford won't be able to build enough Lightnings to fill all those pre-orders, let alone meet demand. The goal is to build 150,000 Lightnings a year, but right now there just aren't enough batteries to get there. Ford is investing in battery plants, expanding the Lightning factory, and hiring more people, but all of that is just going to take time. Until then, either you're stuck waiting on the pre-order list until next year, or you're fighting it out with dealers, some of whom are marking the Lightning up by 10, 20, even 100,000 dollars. Ford's trying to get all those dealers back in line, but there's a lot of baggage there and a lot of challenges along the way. But if the Lightning is actually going to be as important of an EV as it should be, Ford has to figure it out. In the end, there's two ways to look at the Lightning. First, it's a terrific EV F-150 that will ease a lot of truck owners into buying an electric vehicle, and in that way, it's a huge success. If I could actually find one to buy for a reasonable price, I'd trade in my F-150. Issues with the software aside, it's that good. The second challenge, which is that the Lightning sometimes feels caught between two worlds. Right now, it's very much a truck with a slow tablet in it, and letting go of some of that F-150 tradition and letting this thing really be a computer on wheels will take the Lightning from really good to historically great. When blues... When blue... When blues clues is great, it's great. When Blue Cruise works, it's great. I went on a 300-mile road trip with my wife over the weekend. We used Blue Cruise for all the highways we were on, and this car happily drove itself down the highway and navigated some construction.