42 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
truck goes on sale this spring, the fu-
ture of mobility will meet America’s fa-
vorite ride—a momentous encounter
not only for Ford but for all of us,
whether we drive, bike, or walk. The fu-
ture of the planet, and of human life on
it, may depend on how rapidly the auto
industry can reduce tailpipe emissions.
Until now, most consumer E.V.s
have been sedans, like Tes-
la’s Model 3. But sedans are
a dying segment of the over-
all U.S. car market. During
the nineteen-nineties, pick-
ups and S.U.V.s were ex-
empt from the luxury tax
imposed on cars that cost
more than thirty thousand
dollars. These bigger vehi-
cles were transformed from
spartan conveyances into
workingmen’s Rolls, and returned much
larger profits than sedans could earn.
I bought an F-150 in 2015, with seventy-
two-months of low-interest financing,
to use on the former dairy farm in Ver-
mont that has become our family vaca-
tion place and pandemic retreat. (The
New Jersey farm is long gone.) But in
cold months I park it on the street in
Brooklyn, where you can sometimes find
me in it, seeking solitude in the spacious
back seat. I love my truck, although I
have yet to bestow an affectionate nick-
name on it, as do one in four truck own-
ers, according to a Ford-commissioned
study, and I don’t have a truck tattoo, like
fifteen per cent of my cohort. I was, how-
ever, more than a little excited to see my
pickup’s new electric twin.
The Lightning was under wraps
inside the Lightning Theatre, a large,
multimedia-equipped tent in the mid-
dle of Austin’s Republic Square. Before
the big reveal, attendees gathered out-
side in the hot sun to hear from a panel
of executives about Ford’s plans for elec-
trifying its fleet. Looming overhead was
Bronco Mountain—a steel-girded ver-
tical road that the automaker had erected
to demonstrate the off-road climbing
capabilities of its newly revamped S.U.V.
Ford has pledged that by 2030 forty
per cent of its global sales will be E.V.s;
ambitious benchmarks have also been set
by General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toy-
ota. These promises have proved popu-
lar with investors, but will enough car
buyers switch from gas to meet such lofty
goals? According to the International En-
ergy Agency, only two per cent of the ve-
hicles sold in the U.S. in 2020 were E.V.s.,
far behind E.V. adoption rates in China
and Europe. In Norway, seventy-five per
cent of new car sales in 2020 were E.V.s.
Onstage, Linda Zhang, the forty-
four-year-old chief engineer of the F-150
Lightning, was describing the electric
truck’s “mega-power frunk.”
In common with all E.V.s,
the F-150 Lightning has no
engine. Instead of a hunk
of throbbing, greasy metal
up front, there’s a lockable
storage space large enough
to fit two sets of golf clubs,
and equipped with a drain
so that the frunk can be
filled with ice and drinks
for tailgating, or “front-
gating,” as Zhang put it. (“Frunking,”
the logical neologism, was perhaps too
risqué for a family brand.)
In addition to performing traditional
tasks like hauling and towing, Zhang
claimed, a Lightning with a fully charged
battery could serve as an electric gen-
erator, powering a home for several days
in the event of an electrical outage. “I
know you guys have struggled a little
bit with storms and the power outages,”
she added, referring to Texas’s extreme
cold snap last winter.
Another Ford executive, Darren
Palmer, the British-born general man-
ager of Battery Electric Vehicles, ex-
plained that the company would rely on
its strengths, among them its long man-
ufacturing track record, its dominance
in commercial and municipal fleets of
pickups and vans, and its established
brands. “Electrify our icons,” as Palmer
described the core strategy to me later.
A longtime petrol-head himself—Palmer
races his Shelby Cobra, a sixties-era mus-
cle car with a Ford engine—he described
getting his Mach-E as a kind of con-
version experience. When the car man
declared emotionally from the stage, “It
kind of makes me angry when I go to a
gas station now!,” it felt like a Petroleum
Anonymous recovery group.
Sitting next to Palmer, Muffi Ghadi-
ali, a former Amazon executive who is
helping to build Ford’s charging network,
assured the audience that “range anxi-
ety”—worrying about the state of your
battery, and where your next charge iscoming from—was overblown. Ford lacks
a nationwide network of branded charging
stations like the one that Tesla has built
in the past decade. Instead, the company
has patched together nineteen thousand
five hundred stations across the U.S., op-
erated by independent providers such
as Electrify America and ChargePoint.
Ghadiali said that they were everywhere.
The audience was then invited inside
the Lightning Theatre. The electric
F-150 twirled on a dais while graphics
flashed on a wraparound screen behind
it, and a spokesperson touted the truck’s
attributes. In contrast to the Mustang
Mach-E, Ford has kept the styling of
the F-150 Lightning almost exactly the
same as that of the 2022 gas F-150, in-
side and out. One obvious difference is
a horizontal bar of light that forms part
of the hood and links the headlights.
Palmer noted that owners who have
accessories that fit their existing F-150s—
like the cover I have for my truck’s bed—
won’t need to buy new gear. “Custom-
ers told us, ‘Do not mess with the bed!’”
Palmer explained to me. Retaining the
gas F-150’s body also saves Ford hun-
dreds of millions in retooling costs. The
trade-off is that the new electric truck
doesn’t look very new.
Zhang invited me inside the Light-
ning to chat. She got behind the wheel,
realized she didn’t have the key fob, and
went to find it. I waited there, search-
ing the dashboard for something to mark
this milestone in automotive history. I
counted the cup holders in the console:
four, the same number as in my truck.
“Are you a car person?” I asked when
Zhang returned. She replied, “Well, I
moved here from China when I was
eight.” Her first ever car ride was from
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to West La-
fayette, Indiana, where her father was
pursuing a Ph.D. at Purdue University.
“It was the middle of the night,” she re-
called. “Such an impactful journey.”
Zhang’s father, after getting his Ph.D.,
eventually went to work for Ford. He
sometimes brought his daughter along.
“I thought, Wow, this is interesting. And
a lot of the things he was doing he would
talk about at the dinner table,” she told
me. Zhang received three degrees from
the University of Michigan, in electri-
cal engineering, computer engineering,
and an M.B.A. When she started at
Ford, in 1996, she worked on Mustang