One of the chief concerns that a lot of folks have when it comes to electric vehicles – at least, those that live in places that experience winter weather – is the fact that they tend to lose a considerable amount of range in cold temperatures. One way automakers have worked to mitigate that cold weather range loss is with a heat pump, and that includes The Blue Oval, which has added that particular feature to a number of its EVs in recent years. Now, the 2026 Ford E-Transit will become the next to do so.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the 2026 Ford E-Transit will gain a heat pump as standard equipment for the new model year. It’s a vapor injected heat pump, so that piece is presumably the same one present in the Ford Mustang Mach-E and Ford F-150 Lightning, too. The F-150 Lightning first gained a standard vapor injected heat pump for the 2024 model year, after FoMoCo filed a number of patents outlining various designs for that particular feature.
The Ford Mustang Mach-E followed suit for the 2025 model year, as the EV crossover gained a standard vapor injected head pump across the lineup at that point, too, along with a variety of other minor tweaks for the new year. Finally, those models were joined by the European E-Transit Custom, E-Tourneo Custom, and extended-range E-Transit this past March.
Ford’s Vapor-Injected Heat Pump (VIHP) heats the cabin in an efficient way by capturing heat energy from outside air, and it uses cold refrigerant gasses to absorb heat from the environment and then compress those gasses to raise their temperatures, using only a small amount of electrical energy to power the heat pump. Ford’s patented VIHP unit leans on vapor injection to help improve efficiency as well, both when heating and cooling the cabin. When temperatures rise above 25 degrees celsius, the integrated cooling system is able to pull heat out of the cabin, which also reduces the amount of battery power needed to cool the interior.
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