When it comes to reasons to not get an EV, it’s not just that EVs have a nasty tendency to burst into flames and be difficult to put out, or that taking a road trip in one is near-impossible because of the short battery range and painfully long charging time, or that sitting around at a charging station waiting for one to charge seems dangerous, or that the towing range of even the EV trucks is limited.
It’s also that, well, replacing the battery on one could set you back more than the cost of just buying a car to replace the battery-powered toy and have a useful vehicle. Such is what the Western Journal recently reported, saying:
A month or two ago I had to replace my car. I bought a 2019 Ford F-150 XL with slightly higher-than-average mileage for its age and an impeccable service record. The truck is in great shape, and, supply chains being what they are in 2022, I paid more than I wanted to for it.
It still cost less than a replacement battery for an electric vehicle.
Perhaps some EV battery replacements are cheaper. But not for a Ford Lightning, the closest competitor to the famed, highly popular Ford F-150 with a combustion engine. If you get a Lightning and then need to pop in a new battery that’ll cost you a whopping $35,000, as the Western Journal went on to report, saying:
Tim Edterdahl of “Pickup Truck Plus SUV Talk” fame looked into the costs of battery replacements for an F-150 Lightning, which he’d been driving for a week to review, and he found some pretty startling numbers.
There are two possible batteries for the Lightning, the standard, designed to give the driver about 230 miles of range, and the extended range version, which increases that to about 300 miles, Esterdahl said.
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Esterdahl is clearly the kind of guy who wants to get the bad news out of the way first, as he showed a screen shot of the price for the extended range battery to start.
It was $35,960.
Oh, and the standard battery, if you don’t need those 70 extra miles, is “only” $28,556.47.
Watch Edterdahl’s review of the Ford Lightning here:
So perhaps just buying a gas-powered truck and filling it up would be more cost-effective…$35,000 is a lot of gallons of gas, even with Brandon in charge.
In fact, with Consumer Reports saying that the average consumer saves about $1000 a year (or less) in fuel savings from buying an EV, you better hope that battery lasts a long, long while. Or just buy a normal, combustion-powered car or truck and wait for EV technology to improve.
But, to be fair, you only need the replacement if the truck fails. As Edterdahl pointed out:
“Could a battery just die? Yeah. Could a new Ford F-150 truck engine just die? Yeah. They both could die.”
Still, though, the cost is immense and would likely prove prohibitive to most consumers if the battery in their Ford Lightning did “just die”.
By: Gen Z Conservative