Ready to ignore all the warning signs about the problems with electric vehicles and buy an EV car or truck? Well then you might want to do a bit more reading, as that would not appear to be the wisest course of action available.
That’s particularly true of the EV trucks, which might look cool and have snazzy marketing campaigns framing them as the next big thing, but fail to live up to the hype in any way.
The Ford EV truck, the Lightning, for example, has a well-documented inability to tow a trailer anywhere near as far as it claims it will. So it will be a big problem if you, say, need to tow something more than a few dozen miles.
Then there’s the Hummer EV, which takes four days to charge unless you have a special charger…in which case it still takes a full day to fill up to go fewer miles than a normal, combustion-powered truck that can fill up in five minutes.
And that’s before getting into the other problems with EVs, namely that the battery fires burn hotter than hell itself, they’re highly expensive, their range is limited, and the charging situation is less than ideal if you need to, say, fill it up in an emergency.
Well, it turns out the charging time problem present with the Hummer EV truck is also a problem with the Ford Lightning, as a few journalists found out when they took the Lightning to a campground and found out that it would take a week to charge. Well, a work week…five days.
Watch that here:
As you can see in the video, the TFL journalists were doing a long road trip with the truck and tried to plan the charging situation out ahead of time by stopping at Carter Lake, Colorado and renting a campsite that included both a standard 120-volt outlet and a larger 240-volt charging option.
Popping in the “standard” (120 volt) charger, the journalists found out that the truck, which still had a 22% battery charge, would take FIVE DAYS to fill up! And that’s not even from empty, it’s from 22%! Five days!
Fortunately, the truck could accept a 240 Volt charger and so they plugged that in and found that it would take “only” 14 hours to charge instead of 5 days. An improvement, to be sure, though still far, far, far longer than it would take to pump 35 gallons of gas into an absolutely empty gas-powered F-150 with a large tank. That takes just a few minutes and can be done anywhere with E 85 or up gas.
Perhaps the Lightning would be fine for driving around town…if you didn’t need to tow anything. But for a backcountry adventure or long road trip, particularly if you aren’t guaranteed access to those 240 volt, “Type 2” chargers? Not so much. Maybe just stick to what’s tried and true and won’t leave you stranded in the woods.
Technology improves, so maybe one day these slick-looking but practically purposeless EV trucks will be useful. But as of now, taking your money elsewhere would appear to be the far smarter decision.
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