The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 41

ANNALSOFTECHNOLOGY

GREEN GIANTS

Pickups—and their drivers—go electric.

BY JOHNSEABROOK

0 Lightning, are coming on the market.

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL SHEPARD

W

hen I was twelve, in 1971,

the walls of my bedroom

in southern New Jersey

were covered with full-page photo-

graphs of rail dragsters and “funny cars”

with swollen engines which I carefully

razor-bladed from hot-rod magazines.

My older cousin Charlie Seabrook and

his car, the Jersey Jimmy, were well

known on the East Coast drag-racing

circuit. On Saturdays in warmer weather,

Charlie and his brother Larry would

work on engines down the road from

my family’s farm, and I would hang

around and watch, in love with the

words they used—which showed up a

few years later in Springsteen lyrics like

“Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and

steppin’ out over the line,” in “Born to

Run,” and “Fuelie heads and a Hurst

on the f loor,” from “Racing in the

Street,” a song about guys like Char-

lie, the “hot-rod angels/Rumbling

through this Promised Land.”

My cousins tried to teach me about

how the power train delivers torque to

the wheels. But I was more interested in

car guys—the engineer cowboys who

raced their “suicide machines” on week-

ends. Dreaming of one day having that

kind of power and independence myself,

I built plastic models of the cars that

decorated my walls alongside their driv-

ers, a gallery of petrol gods I knew chiefly

by aliases: the Snake, the Mongoose, the

Flyin’ Hawaiian, and “Big Daddy” Don

Garlits, King of the Dragsters.

That year, the National Hot Rod

Association’s Summernationals came

to Englishtown, New Jersey. Charlie,

who was eventually inducted into the

N.H.R.A. Hall of Fame, was racing,

and I got to go with some friends and

stroll through the pits. Top-fuel drag-

sters run largely on nitromethane, a vol-

atile fuel that contains oxygen. The pits

were a mechanical Pamplona of nitro-

methane bulls, their belching tailpipes

and fiery exhaust wrinkling the air, and

their pit crews almost feral with the

oddly fruity aroma of the fuel and the

acrid stench of the smoking, treadless

tires that the guys called slicks.

I

thought of Charlie, who died in

2016, and the Jersey Jimmy recently,

at the opening of a pop-up theme park

that the Ford Motor Company created

in downtown Austin, Texas, in mid-

October, to display its 2022 lineup of

S.U.V.s, trucks, and vans. As of 2020,

Ford no longer sells sedans in the U.S.,

a development that might have horri-

fied my cousin, a confirmed car guy.

But, instead of the nitrous roar of

the Englishtown pits, the most com-

pelling sound I heard in Austin was the

silence of Ford’s Mustang Mach-E as

it zipped along a short track, to show

off the rapid acceleration that electric

vehicles, or E.V.s, are capable of. The

Mach-E is a battery-powered version

of the sports car that Ford introduced

at the 1964 New York World’s Fair;

Ford unveiled it as an electric S.U.V. in

2019, in keeping with the company’s

move away from muscle and toward

family vehicles with cargo space.

The star of the show was the F-150

Lightning—an electric version of the

pickup that belongs to the best-selling

vehicle line of any kind in the U.S. since

the early nineteen-eighties. In a good

year, Ford sells on average nine hun-

dred thousand gas-powered F-series

trucks, and earns about forty billion

dollars annually from the line.

The Lightning, together with the

Mach-E, and an electric Ford Transit,

its cargo van, collectively represent the

hundred-and-eighteen-year-old auto-

maker’s best and perhaps last chance to

catch up with Elon Musk and Tesla, the

dominant company in E.V. sales. (Tesla

delivered close to a million electric vehi-

cles worldwide in 2021; Ford dealers sold

only about forty-three thousand E.V.s

globally last year.) When Ford’s electric