Real Men Drive Electric Trucks

Photographs by Giancarlo D’Agostaro

“We brought the car to the American people. Then we built them a truck,” a male voice boomed during the launch event for the Ford F-150 Lightning. As the streetlights of Dearborn, Michigan, flickered lazily behind the stage set up outside company headquarters, a giant screen showed black-and-white footage of workers at an early-20th-century Ford assembly plant. Across half an hour of futuristic blue strobes and thunderous sound effects, the American mythos flashed on the screen—cowboys, football players, oil-rig workers. For men like these (and almost all were men, most of them white) this electric truck would be “a hard-working partner with an unbreakable handshake,” a narrator intoned. The Ford F-150 Lightning won’t be available to consumers until next spring, but its reveal was considered such a big deal—by both the auto industry and supporters of renewable energy—that President Joe Biden showed up the day before for a test drive.

U.S. consumers are in the midst of a 40-year-long love affair with pickup trucks, one that began when pickups were marketed to urban and suburban consumers. Five of the top 10 vehicles sold in the United States in 2020 were pickups, which, according to preliminary 2020 data, get almost 40 percent fewer miles driven for each gallon of fuel consumed than smaller cars. Pickups are getting bigger too: The newest Ford F-250 can weigh up to 5,700 pounds (almost 1,400 pounds more than the 1999 model) and towers over most of us mortals, making it a true menace if driven by someone keen on pushing others off the road.

Enter the all-electric pickup. The Lightning is one of several about to by 2023, consumer options will include General Motors’