Can it tow and off-road?
Hello i’m scott brady with overland journal and expedition portal and i’m coming out of the frunk of the 2022 ford lightning electric vehicle pickup this thing is actually super fun to drive so start off with zero to 60 in four seconds and it works just like a regular pickup you can go to home depot you can take the kids to school but then it’s also got that
Performance and it does have all-wheel drive so this is the model with the extended range and it’s got the two motor unit as well so let’s not only see how it does on our test track let’s also tell the story of towing an hq19 black series trailer all the way from prescott arizona to southern california and back okay here i am with the ford lightning now this is
The dual motor model and it’s also the extended range model as well so that puts it at about 320 miles but once you hook a trailer like this behind it so this is the black series hq19 so it’s about 25 feet overall length and about 7 500 pounds and just over 10 feet tall you put all those parameters into the truck and it actually helps recalculate your new range
Towing a trailer like that so that gives me about 162 miles now and interestingly enough i am 136 miles from my first high-speed charging station in quartzite so it’ll be about 300 mile trip to southern california where we’re gonna swap out the hq19 for a brand new one and uh see how this lightning does towing it the whole way all right so we’re currently driving
Down iron springs on our way into skull valley and we are regening nicely shows we have a 136 mile range and we have 133 miles to go to the first fast charging station in quartzite arizona so it’s gonna be close all right so we’re going down the yarnell grade which is good news because it gives us the chance for some regen as you can see here on the dash
I’m pushing quite a bit in regen back which is uh making a difference so i’m at 108 miles of range and 98 miles to the next fast charging station all right so i’m cruising along here on arizona 60 i’ve got 51 miles of range and it shows that i’ve got 30 miles to the next charging station here which is awesome and it is just a beautiful evening sun is setting
Over the mountains it’s just gorgeous and it’s a relaxing easy drive in this truck there’s a lot of technology in this vehicle so since most of the drive so far has been uh downhill i’ve been able to take advantage of a regen so that’s the reason why i’m gonna make make it to quartzite with plenty of miles to spare and then the adaptive cruise control just makes
It very easy it also has kind of an intelligent driver assist crews as well so you have to have your hand on the wheel and otherwise it just cruises along and even makes turns for you doing a great job the truck is driving so it certainly reduces driver fatigue and it’s just plenty of power i mean it goes zero to sixty in four seconds so towing a seven thousand
Pound trailer just feels effortless as far as towing performance goes a very stable truck as well with the independent front and rear suspension you know that would obviously affect off-road performance slightly but on-road performance is just excellent okay so the range indicator is at 25 miles acres along at 60 miles an hour here on i-10 quartzite off in the
Distance absolutely beautiful twilight as well and you can see that we’re about 5.9 miles from the charging station shoehorn the black series and the lightning into the charging station fortunately there’s nobody else here and a couple of the charging stations are down but i’m now connected to the 350 kilowatt which will have me charged up in just a matter
Of a couple hours which is so much more efficient that’s one of the big considerations is how do you gain back that efficiency that you have at the pump and of course putting a big pipe of electricity into here is the same way that you do that so i came in with 21 miles remaining uh didn’t have too much range anxiety it was for me was actually kind of fun but
It’s really interesting to get it on charge right now all right so we’re at scirocco summit and we’ve been charging for just a little bit over three hours here we’ve added 246 miles of range not towing range but total range that we’ve added and then uh we’re at 95 so that’s gonna be plenty uh to get us going again all right so like many new technologies uh just
Because an app says that something exists doesn’t mean that it does i remember traveling early on and the place would say that they have wi-fi and oftentimes you could connect to wi-fi but there was no connection to the internet uh same thing with ev charging so the apps show that there’s a fast charger here at the farmhouse restaurant and there’s not so we’re
Gonna continue on and find another one all right so this is one of the challenges pulling a trailer not all the charging stations are actually in a spot that is uh really trailer accessible so parked up on the curb here and i am connected to a fast charger which makes a big difference so it’s only going to be oh it’ll be less than two hours and i’ll be to 98
Charged and i’m currently at 20 charge so pretty quick uh not too long and i’m at the big outlet mall so i’m gonna grab some food and try not to buy anything and see how the charging goes so one of the things that i notice is when you’re driving with cruise control on and in modified autonomous mode that these truckers grooves create quite a challenge for the
Truck especially with the trailer behind it so the combination of the trucker screws and the black series can result in the wheel really fighting back and forth it gets into this little bit of a of a cyclic scenario where it’s kind of ramping up and down the sides of the trucker’s grooves and then once the trailer starts to move then the truck has to more
Aggressively respond which just starts to accelerate the the wobble um you can see it a little bit in the wheel but i can feel it more in the seat of my pants so that’s one of the challenges uh because in trucker’s grooves all it takes is just a little bit of side pressure so you would just move either a little bit more towards the middle and then put pressure
On one side of the trucker screws with just a little bit of main shaft angle input like i’m doing slightly pressuring to the left but the truck won’t in autonomous mode it won’t do that itself but that’s how you solve this wobble that we’re getting and sway out of the trailer uh as a result of the trucker’s grooves in the semi-autonomous mode just crossing
Over the colorado river here got 18 miles to go here to uh quartzite and i’ve got a 45 mile range just had a warning pop up a few miles ago that i am uh my driving range is low but uh cruising along here 55 miles an hour works in california because that’s the speed limit when you’re towing a trailer but uh arizona’s the wild wild west and it seems like the
Average speed is 85 even by the truckers so i actually need to increase my speed a little bit now that i have crossed the border all right so the 350 kilowatt charging is the key it’s only going to take its 7-eleven right now and it’s only going to take just over an hour to uh to go 70 percent of the charge so that is much quicker than i’ve seen with the other
Chargers but i do need to get it to 100 if i’m going to make it all the way back to prescott i’m not so sure that i will so i might actually have to have a a rescue team on standby we will report back a beautiful evening here in quartzite and of course we’re not needing to pay 6.23 for diesel right now it ends up being about 40 bucks to fill up the truck with
Electricity when i fill it up from the office it was just under 18 to fill up the lightning all right so let’s talk about how the ford lightning did through our test track we took it through the lower portion of the track which is where we take every vehicle there’s a lot of crossed axle events there’s an extreme side slope uh good low traction events to give
Us a sense for how the traction control works and the ev is very interesting so there aren’t traditional prop shafts the front axle is not connected to the rear axle so the rear has a locker in it which i got no wheel spin out of and the front would actually spin faster than the rear to try to give it some additional traction which i found really interesting and
It actually worked really well so i would get some wheel spin out of the front and the brake traction control works in the front so that was actually assisting to pull the vehicle through the obstacles now that rear locker is super important because this vehicle has very limited articulation so this is independent front suspension and independent rear suspension
With heavy sway bars anti-sway bars so we don’t get a lot of articulation out of this truck it doesn’t feel unstable though because the center gravity is extremely low those battery packs and the motors are all down at the lower part of the body so you just really don’t feel like that the vehicle is unsettled at all in fact i took it to the maximum side slope that
I could at 23 degrees and it felt more stable than most vehicles at five or six degrees even less than that the other thing that i like good camera views available to it the locker in the rear is kind of interesting you actually have to go into a menu and touch sensitive turn the locker on and off which takes some getting used to but it’s working and we were
Able to make it all the way through the lower section of our test track but overall this truck actually works really well as a truck so it tows effortlessly i pulled a 7 000 pound black series hq 19 trailer behind it and it accelerates it’s it feels like as fast as other full-size trucks without a trailer zero to 60 in four seconds makes this really fun to drive
Around town the handling is excellent because again that weight is very low ride quality is excellent for that front and rear independent suspension overall nvh is extremely low as well go through cons this is primarily from the perspective of over landing so off-road the vehicle works fine it doesn’t work quite as well as a higher trim level off-road trim level
Ford f-150 mostly because of that independent rear suspension but it does work but i’m seeing limited articulation a little bit more wheel spin because that front axle is trying to act work more actively to get the vehicle through the obstacle but the real thing that you notice about this truck is that when you hook up a trailer to it you get into about 120 miles
Of range and that is just too little range in order to make it between most stops i was able to get all the way to southern california and back but i had a little range anxiety and it added a bunch of time to my trip i’m constantly trying to find a charger not only a charger that works for the vehicle and gets enough current into it so a higher or faster charge
Rate but then i’ve also got a trailer behind me so i’m trying to find a place to park i think the existing ev infrastructure isn’t really set up for trucks towing trailers without the trailer i don’t think any of that would be a big deal i could drive pretty much all the way to southern california on a single charge so that wouldn’t have been an issue but with
The trailer behind it it cuts the the travel distance nearly in half the other thing about it is not every place has good infrastructure for charging so where i live in prescott there was one charger downtown and it was inoperable yesterday so it didn’t work and i had to go find another charger which was even slower and it was 10-15 minutes away from my home so
You have to be mindful of that you’re going to want to have an own a home charging system and then you’re going to want to really plan out your trips well that’s not a downside to the ford lightning the lightning works great it’s just that existing ev infrastructure is not quite to the level that we need it to be for long distance overland travel i will say though
That it is coming those changes will improve the infrastructure will improve and this will end up being a solution for around the world overland travel
Transcribed from video
2022 Ford F150 Lightning 4wd By Expedition Portal
