2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Design Breakdown
Ford’s first electric pickup truck (actually, correction: they built a few Ranger EV trucks in the late 1990s) the 2022 F-150 Lightning, is finally here, so let’s look at the design of the thing because it’s a big deal. It’s not actually all that, um, exciting a design, if I’m being brutally honest, but that’s okay, because there’s a good reason: it’s an F-150, the best-selling vehicle Ford makes. It’s a known design that just works, and Ford would be bonkers to mess with it too much. Ford is not bonkers.
The fact that this is an electric F-150 has to be the baseline for any evaluation of its design. That’s why the inevitable comparisons of the Lightning to Tesla’s dramatically designed Cybertruck are going to be, depending on how cranky you are at the moment, interesting or annoying. They’re approaching electric truck design from the two opposite ends of the spectrum.
Before we compare the Ford to the Tesla, though, let’s just take a quick look at the design choices made on this new kind of F-150 …
