Range Finder: Ford F-150 Lightning’s range less than 160 km when towing

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If you’ve ponied up a deposit for Ford’s new battery-powered F-150 Lightning, I hope you don’t plan on doing much towing with it. Or, at least, that you don’t plan on towing anything very heavy. Or, according to the YouTubers at The Fast Lane Truck, towing anything very far. In fact, as it turns out, if you’re hauling a trailer, don’t plan on going much further than 150 or so kilometres.

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Originally, Andre Smirnov and Tommy Mica’s experiment was supposed to be a competition, pitting Ford’s new F-150 Lightning BEV with the Extended-Range 131-kilowatt-hour battery against an old-school GMC Sierra Denali Ultimate Edition with a 6.2-liter V-8 gas engine, both towing identical (empty) three-ton ATC trailers. The idea was incredibly simple yet probatively informative: hit the open road for destinations distant and see which could go further on a single “tank.”

It wasn’t much of a contest.

At the very beginning, the F-150’s onboard computer predicted 282 miles of range after being given a full charge at an Electrify America DC fast-charging station. That’s 453 kilometres. Not nearly as much as, say, a diesel-fueled GMC, or its claimed maximum range, but more-than-useful nonetheless.

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But when Tommy, who appears to have lucked out in the drawing of straws, inputs the size of the trailer — 25 feet long by 9 feet wide and 12 feet high while weighing about 6,000 pounds — into the operating system’s range estimator, the onboard computer then spit out a diminished range of 160 miles (257 km). In other words, the Lightning had, according to the computer, lost almost 45 per cent of its boasted range just by adding a trailer.

It got worse. Much worse, in fact, because—

Even that turned out to be a gross exaggeration. The Lightning didn’t get very far — about 39 miles (62 km) to be exact — before it became obvious that it was using about 1 per cent of battery charge for every mile travelled on the highway. With just 40 miles under its tires, just 61 per cent of the battery’s lithium-ions remained active. That’s about 0.7 miles (barely over a kilometre) per kilowatt-hour, an efficiency insinuating that, despite its huge battery — again, 131 kWh — it was only going to be able to power the trailer-burdened F-150 for about 100 miles (160 km/h).

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And, before you ask, the boys from Fast Lane, being responsible truckers, at least when towing borrowed trailers, were averaging about 62 miles per hour (almost bang on 100 km/h).

Eventually, they had to abandon the trip. Not only did they not make it to the charging station in Pueblo, Colorado — which was originally within the 160 miles the F-150 promised it could attain — but, soon enough, Tommy had a serious case of range anxiety and had to turn around because the only charging point within his paltry range remaining was behind him. Even that was, according to the now-stressed schmo behind the wheel of the BEV pickup, going to be “tight, tight, tight.” Eventually he made it to another fast-charging station with nine per cent charge remaining and 85.9 (138 km/h) miles showing on the odometer. Like I said, not even 160 klicks on a full battery.

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Andre’s Denali Ultimate, meanwhile, had barely put a dent into its tank. In the end, out of politeness to his partner, he turned around and returned to their Longmont, Colorado home base, ending the 155.8-mile (250-km) drive with 65 (104 km) more still left in the tank. That represents an overall average of 8.9 miles per gallon.

Overall, the gas-powerws Denali went roughly two-and-a-half times as far as the Lightning, and then took about one-and-a-half-minutes of refueling before it was ready to do it all over again. The electric Ford, meanwhile, needed 45 minutes to get to the battery back up to 74 per cent of its former capacity. Luckily for Tommy, his Lightning’s gearshift folds down and the console folds over to form a ‘picnic table’ for the chicken he ordered while waiting because, well you know, all electric vehicle owners really do like to stop to eat every 85.9 miles.

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One last thing: like with most electric vehicles, there seems to be some confusion over the F-150’s onboard range-estimator software. For instance, at one point, the F-150 is about half-empty after only having travelled 51 miles (82 km), but the travel computer still says it has 75 miles (120 km) left.

Worse yet, just as the range estimator says it has those 75 miles in the bank — more than enough to make it to their Pueblo charging station — the computer’s battery percentage estimator says it will have zero per cent charge left when he gets there. As Tommy says, “And I bet, soon enough, it’s going to say we get there with a negative charge!” This is just about the time when he decides he needs to turn back.

If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that EV range estimators are notoriously optimistic, and their efficiency-range remaining readouts are often wildly inaccurate. Trust them at your peril.