Ford delivers its first F-150 Lightning as EV truck war kicks into high gear

A rural Michigan person grew to become the first man or woman in the country to obtain a Ford F-150 Lightning, in accordance to Bloomberg. Nicholas Schmidt, the chief technological innovation officer of a grid optimization startup, took shipping Thursday of a silver electrical truck at Richardson Ford, a dealership in the tiny town of Standish, Michigan.

According to Bloomberg, Schmidt owns a Tesla Model 3 and set a deposit down for a single of the company’s Cybertrucks and also viewed as getting a Rivian R1T truck as nicely. He said his wife was relieved when it was crystal clear that the F-150 Lightning would be the very first to arrive. (Schmidt has since tweeted that his Cybertruck reservation is “no extended essential.”)

Ford is counting on its a long time of generation and shipping skills as perfectly as its large network of dealerships as it seeks to vault more than its rivals in the race to get electric vehicles to the most people. Trucks are amongst the prime-providing automobiles in the region, and the F-150 has been the best-marketing motor vehicle in the US for the previous 40 many years.

Even though Rivian has the distinction of remaining the to start with to provide its electrical truck to marketplace, Ford’s electrified F-sequence is anticipated to drive far more customers to think about switching to EVs. And in spite of staying introduced in 2019, the Tesla Cybertruck has been consistently delayed and now isn’t anticipated to go into manufacturing until eventually 2023 at the earliest.

The EV truck war will be fierce, but Ford may perhaps have acquired by itself some breathing area thanks to the velocity with which it got the F-150 Lightning to current market. Normal Motors’ began delivering its premium Hummer EV truck to clients earlier this year, but at approximately three occasions the cost of the F-150 Lightning, it genuinely simply cannot be thought of to be in the same group. The automaker’s Chevy Silverado EV will likely be much extra reasonably priced but is not expected to start creation right until 2023. In the meantime, Stellantis hasn’t claimed when its electric Ram 1500 truck will debut.

But Ford will have some constraints of its very own. The quantity of electrical F-150s Ford prepared on making in its initial number of a long time of generation has been a little bit of a shifting goal. At to start with, the enterprise was only focusing on 40,000 cars per year, finally telling suppliers it expected that capacity to rise to 80,000 by early 2023. Now, that selection has risen to 150,000 vans by mid-2023 — while it’s unclear how several will arrive at consumers this yr.

The company is working with a “wave-by-wave reservation process” to tell consumers when they can go on the web to spec out their Lightnings. Earlier this 12 months, Ford stopped using reservations just after owning collected 200,000 refundable $100 deposits for the Lightning because it debuted in May 2020. (Reservations are still shut as of the publication of this post.) The creation concentrate on from Ford’s Rouge Electrical Car or truck Heart is 160,000 models for each calendar year.

Schmidt advised Bloomberg that he ideas on applying his F-150 Lightning to do truck things, like hauling wooden and towing. How quite a few a lot more clients will get to do truck stuff with their F-150 Lightnings this yr will be up to Ford.