Stop Worrying and Love the F-150 Lightning

Or more relevant, for our purposes: Ford sells about 900,000 F-150s every year; all automakers collectively sold 250,000 new EVs total last year. “This may be one of the important products in decarbonization,” Tim Latimer, an energy-industry veteran, tweeted last week. (He is now the chief executive of the geothermal company Fervo.) An electric F-150 opens up an enormous new market for EVs and signals that climate-friendly technology has reached the soybean fields and construction sites of middle America.

Read: Why Ford’s Mustang Mach-E is so important

It is, as such, almost miraculously simpatico with President Joe Biden’s climate strategy. Biden has pitched climate action as a kind of infrastructure upgrade, and soaked the urgent scientific language of climate change in a rugged American savor. Ford has essentially done the same. (Biden and Ford aren’t so different as brands: old-school American standards with union roots that must address an older, working-class audience and a younger, more professional class at the same time.) So it made sense that Biden essentially debuted the car yesterday during a speech at a Michigan plant where UAW members will assemble the truck, accidentally disclosing the truck’s zero-to-60 acceleration time (4.4 seconds). The two need each other: Biden needs mainstream EVs such as the F-150, and Ford needs Democrats to build thousands of charging stations nationwide, so that consumers feel like buying an EV is actually an option.

3. But forget about the price or the aesthetics: We need a truck like this. Not so long ago, America’s coal-heavy electricity sector posed the greatest threat to the long-term health and stability of the planet’s climate. Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, could put a Friend of Coal license plate on his Tesla and mean it. Then the whirlwind of the 2010s swept through—today, 40 percent of U.S. electricity comes from renewables or zero-power sources—and now the transportation sector is the country’s dirtiest. America’s gasoline-powered cars and light trucks are the main reason. Cars and light trucks now contribute about 20 percent of U.S. emissions, more than any other economic activity.

Read: You’re thinking about home heating wrong

Mass transit accounts for about 1 percent of passenger miles traveled by land in the United States. Even if Americans quadrupled their use of public transportation, most travel would happen by car or truck, whether electric or gas-powered. And even if the country saw a revolution in urban and suburban land use to discourage driving—I am praying for it as much as anyone—private vehicles would remain essential to rural living. We need electric vehicles.

4. An electric vehicle is, at a mechanical level, a giant battery on wheels. Ford is pitching this not only as a technical necessity but as a feature: They want you to plug stuff into the car. “Let’s say you’re at a tailgate or at work. You can set up a cement mixer, a band, or lights and draw only half the power the truck is capable of producing at a time,” Linda Zhang, the chief engineer on the Lightning, told me. Like all electric vehicles, the F-150 replaces the hefty internal-combustion engine with a much smaller electric motor, and like many EVs therefore has a storage compartment under its front hood: a “frunk.” Except the F-150 has a “power frunk”—the most marvelous three-syllable phrase American marketing has produced since “half-priced apps”—meaning that it both opens to the touch of a button and has multiple plugs for appliances.