A New Year's F-150 Lightning Absurdity, Courtesy of Motor Trend

A New Year's F-150 Lightning Absurdity, Courtesy of Motor Trend

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Man, this story is brutal. In it, a writer for Motor Trend chronicles his experiences and challenges he faced while trying to make a 600-mile road trip with a colleague in a Ford F-150 Lightning recently. The writer, Christian Seabaugh, is not a newbie to driving an EV, having driven a Motor Trend-owned this F-150 Lightning Lariat Extended Range model for the last year.

So, the dude knows what he’s doing, beginning with trying to keep his highway speed as close as possible to 70 mph, because that is the speed at which the pickup’s “extended” range is maximized at something close to 287 miles. Diesel truck owners laugh at that number, given their own F-150 diesel models likely achieve double that range, but whatever - we’re signaling virtue here, because that’s what is important in today’s society.

The need for this trip arose on Labor Day when Seabaugh says he got call about a family emergency, so he and his colleague jumped in the truck asap - without doing the advised advance planning of the route on the handy Ford app that helps identify charging locations - and took to the road.

That, he writes, is where his EV disaster began.