Ford unveiled its all-electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, for the first time last spring (and gave us a ride in the prototype). That vehicle will hit the market next year and is proving more popular than Ford anticipated. But Ford is already working on its successor and a range of other electric trucks.
Ford CEO Jim Farley told Automotive News that the company is developing a full-size pickup platform for electric vehicles. That platform will underpin "a vehicle (Ford does) not have today." Ford will build it at their new Blue Oval City facility in Tennessee, which will be ready in 2025. Farley expects it to be an "incredibly high volume" seller.
This move is not a surprise. The F-150 Lightning, while indeed an impressive feat of engineering, is really a stopgap effort built ad hoc from the current F-150 platform. It helps Ford reduce costs by sharing as many components as possible with the combustion F-150. But as Ford sells more electric vehicles, the way forward will be having a common EV truck platform. And Ford backing out of a co-produced vehicle project with Rivian to focus on their own projects suggests they are happy with how those projects are coming along.
An interesting question will be what the vehicle Ford does not have today is. That could refer to the new electric F-Series pickup; Ford technically does not have one that runs on that platform. And we would expect that truck to sell in incredibly high volume. But the beauty of a common EV platform is being able to produce multiple vehicles on the same line easily. So we can hold out hope Farley was referring to a different vehicle entirely that isn't in the lineup yet — perhaps the yet-to-be-announced Bronco electric SUV that Farley alluded to on Twitter earlier this year.
