We pick up our 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning in Dearborn, MI – where the truck was born. It’s a Lariat model with an extended range battery and a max towing package. It’s a fairly luxurious pickup truck with 580 horsepower and 775 lb-ft of torque. It is also expensive. We pay the sticker price, which is just over $80,000. Now, we road-trip it all the way back to Boulder, Colorado. How easy or difficult is it to drive nearly 1,300 miles in about a day and a half? Let’s find out together. This is (part 1) of the trip.
The truck has a 100% state of charge when we leave Dearborn. It has a maximum estimated range of 320 miles, but how about its real-world highway driving range? We drive it like any other pickup truck – at the speed limit. This means we will be going between 65 MPH and 75 MPH a lot of the time (according to the speed limits).
By the time we get to Chicago, our Lightning’s trip meter reads 2.0 miles/kWh. The Lightning pickup truck has 131 kWh of usable battery energy. Doing some simple math, this truck’s highway driving range is approximately 262 miles on a full charge. This is not very far when compared to a gasoline or a diesel pickup truck. Also, getting a full charge (all the way to 100%) can take a long time. This is why we tend to charge between about 15-80% when we stop. The good news is that the Lightning gets a relatively fast and consistent charge. We primarily used Electrify America 350kW fast chargers on this trip. We saw maximum charging speeds between 160-170 kW.
Join part 1 of our cross-country trip in the video below. All of the data is coming soon in part 2.
