A power-ful future

Electric pickup opens brave new world

Progress happens slowly, then suddenly. You see a guy on the street ostentatiously conducting a telephone call with a cellular phone the size of a brick pressed to his ear. Not much later, phones are palmsize and everywhere. Then your phone is a computer and camera and stereo and atlas and game console — so on and so forth rolled into one — and you cannot imagine life without it.

Thus it is with electric vehicles. But the breakthrough moment — the event that turns gradual change into a seismic shift — might only now be at hand. Ford Motor Co. is coming out with an all-electric pickup truck.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Ford’s F-series trucks, most notably the F-150. Despite a hiccup in manufacturing last year caused by a pandemic-related shortage in microchips, the trucks finished 2021 as the best-selling vehicles in the United States for the 45th year in a row.

Ford has been working its way toward this moment for years. Indeed, the company can make a reasonable case for itself as the inventor — certainly the popularizer — of the pickup. Company founder Henry Ford’s world-changing Model T, introduced in 1908 and beloved for nearly two decades, was offered in a number of configurations, including one with the back seat removed from the chassis and replaced with a box for hauling stuff. The purpose-built Ford pickup arrived in 1917, and the F-series made its debut in 1948. The superstar F-150 hit the market in 1975 and sprinted to the head of the pack in sales.

As a first step toward an electric truck, Ford switched from steel to aluminum for the bodies of the F-series in 2015, shaving hundreds of pounds from the vehicles’ weight — but opening the company to derision from competitors. Yet F-series sales were undamaged.

Can Ford do for powertrains what it did for truck bodies? Initial reviews of the electric pickup — the F-150 Lightning — are beyond positive. “You are about to read a rave review,” the Wall Street Journal’s influential auto writer Dan Neil warned his audience. “The Lightning represents an American manufacturing triumph, a brand resurrection, a win for working people, a vehicle segment stepping out of the darkness into the light.”

Neil detailed the truck’s huge towing capacity, expanded storage space and ability to function as a rolling power plant. “Finally,” he wrote, “an EV that isn’t a soft-handed, overpriced toy for white-collar commuters.”

Ushering America’s most popular vehicles into the electric age makes credible the projection by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that more than half of new car and truck sales will be all-electric by 2040. It also promises to escalate the global competition for battery components and puts added pressure on U.S. researchers and manufacturers to create a robust and innovative American battery industry.