Since its launch a couple of years ago, the work-focused Ford F-150 Lightning Pro has proven to be a popular entity with commercial fleet customers, a list that includes the likes of New York City, utility companies like Southern California Edison (SCE), and Vestas, a provider of sustainable energy solutions. Testing has proven that the Ford F-150 Lightning is a great way for fleets to cut emissions and save a considerable amount of money in terms of maintenance costs, and thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the pickup ranked among the top 10 most popular fleet EVs over the past year or so, according to new data from S&P Global Mobility.
Between July 2022 and July 2023, the Ford F-150 Lightning racked up 7,718 new registrations among fleet owners, which was good enough for fourth place on this particular list, ranking it behind the Tesla Model 3 (28,252 registrations), Chevy Bolt (19,502), and Tesla Model Y (11,149). It also ranked the Ford F-150 Lightning ahead of the Rivian EDV (6,390 registrations), Polestar 2 (6,128), Ford E-Transit (5,929), Ford Mustang Mach-E (3,992), Kia Niro (3,712), and Hyundai Kona (2,896).
Overall, Tesla commanded nearly one-third of the entire market over the past 13 months with its 3 and Y sales, which makes sense given its experience building and selling EVs and its dominant share of the overall EV market. This performance was also buoyed by the fact that rental car company Hertz is in the midst of purchasing 100,000 Model 3 sedans from the automaker as well. It’s also worth noting that fleet sales tend to be a bit uneven, and that trend certainly shows up here, as Tesla sold 13,500 Model 3 sedans to fleets in December 2022 and January 2023 combined, but moved 4,300 of them in both July and October 2022.
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Comments
I would have expected the e-transit to be much higher on that list. It would have also been good to give overall numbers of fleet sales to get a bigger picture of EV adoption in fleets. Even as a progressive myself, I still suspect that many of those sales are blue states and companies trying to make a statement, whether it be genuine or for greenwashing. The Ford Lightning has its place I guess, – it’s just a very, very small segment of truly environmentally-conscious use cases. For instance, contractors or anyone who really needs the load and tow capacity, and can even frequently use the EV battery to power tools at job sites that don’t have power, but will only drive it locally (96 to 134 miles round trip) and charge at their home/business >90% of the time. If you don’t need to tow or haul that much or very often, then guess what? You don’t need a Ford f-150 Lightning! And just try to charge at a public charger if you do need to tow a trailer on longer trips! Not a whole lot of use cases in the real world for such a thing…
As far as environmentalist cred, the Ford Lightning’s battery weighs in at 1,800 pounds and that requires a LOT of critical minerals, takes a lot more electricity to charge, and the electric grid in the U.S. still relies heavily on fossil fuels. Critics of electric vehicles are not wrong to criticize the mining practices of the minerals that go into current battery chemistries, but only because of current market trends that are leaning towards bigger and bigger EV’s with longer and longer range – not because it is an inherently bad technology. Mining is bad, but it’s not worse than drilling for oil so it’s still not the argument to maintain the status-quo that critics think it is. However, it’s true that gigantic EV’s with huge range hordes critical minerals and the extraction and processing of these minerals does have negative environmental and social impacts. There is an intersection in that analysis where you aren’t doing the environmentally right thing anymore when you drive such an EV. For instance, I have read that even a Model Y charged on a legacy power grid is only as clean as the most efficient ICE vehicle.
So if Blue States and utility company’s are investing in F-150 Lightning’s for environmental cred, but the intended use-case is not aligned, i.e. they could do the same work in a model 3 or even a PHEV, then they are wasting tax payer money and not helping the environment.
One company that uses them is Electrify America.
They probably need alot of them given how unreliable their Chargers are.