The Ford Motor Company has just revealed the version rendition of its class F-150 truck—with a few unexpected twists.
The company’s F-series has been the best-selling truck in the United States for 42 years. On the 23rd of July, Ford demonstrated exactly what this new vehicle, which also happens to be all-electric, can do.
“What we’re doing here is not just about air quality or rising sea level,” Ted Cannis, global director of electrification at Ford, explained in a Medium post. “We are all about building better trucks for our customers who have real work to do every day. Trucks that can do more for our owners. Trucks that meet new sets of needs.”
In a not-so-subtle swipe to Tesla, the all-electric F-150 is capable of pulling over 1.25 million pounds (almost 567,000 kilograms)—over four times the 300,000 pounds that Elon Musk claimed that Tesla’s pickup could tow.
The car dealership showed off the truck’s capabilities in a YouTube video, first demonstrating how the vehicle could drag a 1,000-foot (over 300 meters) train weighing one million pounds for 1,000 feet. Then, the train was loaded with 42 F-150 trucks, one for each year of success in the US, resulting in approximately 1.25 million pounds for the truck to pull. The test was done in front of several F-150 owners.
We told you an all-electric #F150 was coming. What we didn’t tell you was its capability…until now.
Hauling:
42 F-150s.
10 double-decker freight cars.
1.25 million pounds.The all-electric F-150 prototype is #BuiltFordTough. pic.twitter.com/SFFWReRl2h
— Ford Motor Company (@Ford) July 23, 2019
“There is no greater tension for Ford engineers than doing live tests in front of real truck owners, while cameras are rolling,” Ted explained. “But that’s exactly what we did. As you can imagine, math on paper is never quite the same as real work on the job. Which is why every F-Series is serious about testing … and in this case, seeing what happens with live testing.”
Ford also plans to launch a fully electric, Mustang-inspired SUV and a F-150 hybrid that can serve as a mobile generator.
