Ford F-150 Lightning Reservations Extend Beyond 2022 Model Year

January 5, 2022 1:39 pm

As Ford Authority reported yesterday, the very first wave of Ford F-150 Lightning orders will open up tomorrow, at which time a lucky group of reservation holders will be invited to convert them to orders. However, Ford has also revealed that reservation holders that do not receive one of these invitations in the ensuing waves will be invited to order an F-150 Lightning for a future model year at a later date.

This isn’t terribly surprising given the high level of demand for the Ford F-150 Lightning that admittedly took the automaker by surprise. Ford accepted around 200,000 reservations for its all-electric pickup in just a few months, and CEO Jim Farley expects that a significant 80 percent of those reservation holders will convert them to orders.

Previously, Ford had a goal of ramping up F-150 Lightning production at the Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center to 80,000 units per year by January 2023, and 150,000 annually by 2025. Because of this higher-than-expected demand, the automaker announced this week that it will now ramp production up to 150,000 units annually by mid-2023. Regardless, if a large percentage of reservation holders wind up ordering an F-150 Lightning as expected, this means that a large chunk will not be able to take delivery of a 2022 model. Some dealers are taking advantage of this heavily-tilted supply-demand curve and surprising reservation holders with big markups.

The fact that demand for the F-150 Lightning is far exceeding supply is nothing new, as we’ve seen this happen with a number of recently-released Ford products. That includes the 2021 Ford Bronco, which was met with extreme demand yet suffered from a number of supply chain issues in its first year, the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E, which saw many of its orders pushed back to 2022, and the 2022 Ford Maverick Hybrid, which quickly sold out for the 2022 model year.

We’ll have more on the F-150 Lightning soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for the latest Ford F-Series news, Ford F-150 news, F-150 Lightning news, and continuous Ford news coverage.

By Brett Foote

Brett's lost track of all the Fords he's owned over the years and how much he's spent modifying them, but his current money pits include an S550 Mustang and 13th gen F-150.