A business lesson: offer your customers what they want, not what you think they ought to want. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
The Ford Lightning electric truck may not be goin’ any damn where – to paraphrase what the Toothless Man with the shotgun told Jon Voight in Deliverance – but the little Maverick pickup is going Lobo.
Probably because the latter actually does go – while the former doesn’t go very far.
Ford expected – Ford had hoped – the Lightning was going to be a big hit and a cash cow. It wasn’t. Cash has bled. Like Jon Voight did, when the inbred cracker tried out his knife on him.
The underlying idea wasn’t bad in that a big truck seemed like the ideal place to house a big battery, as opposed to the much smaller space inside a car or even a crossover. And devices need big batteries because they don’t store much energy otherwise.
The fly in the soup was that a big truck is already heavy – even if it has an aluminum-skinned body. A standard – non-electric – 2024 F-150 SuperCrew weighs 4,687 lbs. or more than two tons. It takes a lot of charge to get that much weight moving (especially if it’s also towing another several thousand pounds). So Ford installed a battery that weighs almost two tons more in this device and the result is a three-ton half-ton pick-up that doesn’t go very far because it can’t – on account of all that weight .
The device is also much more expensive than the regular F-150, chiefly on account of that huge (and heavy) battery.
Unsurprisingly, it has not sold well.
Unlike the Maverick, which Ford probably never thought would do as well as it has. But it’s been easily the most successful new model Ford has introduced in years. Probably because it’s not a device – and because it’s useful, as most people expect a truck to be. It goes about twice as far before it has to stop (495 highway miles; 380 in the city vs. 240, maybe) and it only takes a few minutes to get going again. It also costs less than half as much to buy ($23,920 to start) as the device – which starts at $54,955 – Ford had hoped would sell to people who didn’t actually need a truck.
Kamel Curry sure does have a pretty mouth on her.
Where you goin’ city girl! Yee-Haw! (s/)
Why not tell people up front about the limited range and battery that costs almost as much as the whole rig.
Harold the Brain’s son-in-law has the truck and HTB mocks him unmercifully about it. LMFAO!
Old School makes the grade.
O/T-Downloaded a Hot Cars rotation and black Dukes Of Hazzard Challenger was in there for hot look and the 1957 Cadillac.
Local sportsball star had the Roadrunner in original, hanging out at the Irish pub and there he met wifey.
WTF happened, those old cars look like rocket ships, bullets, airplanes, now it’s all the same just different maker logo.
This just in from Jerry Reed:
March Of The Rednecks (Instrumental)
O/T-LMFAO! at Substack stating that feminism is Shelob the spider from the EPIC Lord Of The Rings. (H/T-MTU)
Brilliant!
Zippy/Schlitzie 2024 you always go full pinhead in a fading colostomy bag demockracy.
Enjoy late 1980s CCCP LARP?
Si se puede!
Why so serious?