While walking around the Montana State Fair on Friday, I happened across the Ford Motor Company display booth where they had the new Ford F-150 Lightning on display.
Base price for one of these beauties is $40K .. The unit shown here has a starting price of $70K.
Though these EV’s (electric vehicles) are somewhat extremely impractical for our Montana weather and year ’round road conditions, I thought that it would be nice to get one.
Besides the fact that I’ll be able to go from zero to the 4th of July in 2.0 seconds, I think it might look just damned good sitting in the driveway.
We’ll be building our new house in 2023, so I’m planning on having a charging station installed right in the garage.
At a charging station:
120 power takes 26 hours to charge.
220 power takes 18 hours to charge.
You can get the charging time down to 12 hours if you have a 220 charging station installed at home.
Many Montanan’s don’t see EV’s (any EV’s) as being such a good investment, but given for the sake of sheer novelty, it will do the trick if you feel like showing off to all of your buddies. As far as a charging station being built right into the garage? Well, let’s just say that it would be a major selling point should we ever decide to roll this property over at some point in the future.
The price for charging depends solely on the company supplying the power and can range per kilowatt hour (15 cents to 30 cents).
Our Son was pretty impressed with it as well. He sat in the driver seat and checked out all of the gizmos and gadgets (see the video below).
He has his eye set to driving something like this to school eventually, and with good insurance, I don’t see a problem with that.
The truck weighs in at 2K more pounds than our current F-150 does, and the battery range isn’t exactly something to write home to Mother about either at right around 250 miles. Ford has another add-on battery available that has a range of about 150 more miles.
According to the Rep, battery replacement currently for this particular rig is right around 15K. The price for the replacement battery may or may not change going forward depending on the markets and just how badly we might have pissed China off on any given day.
The F-150 Lightning is pretty bad-ass, but it does have it’s limitations just so’s you know. I already know where the electricity comes from for charging, so I’m not going to sit here and B.S. anyone about my trying to save the environment. EV’s are a novelty item that’s not too unlike the Volkswagen Thing, or the Dune Buggy you built on your living room floor back in the day. EV’s are here and they look cool, and are the latest addition to many of our already well recognized play things. Trust me on this. The folks in Bozeman are spending twice the amount of money on things with a whole lot less coolness factor than the Ford F-150 Lightning has, and they seem quite happy about that.
