You may recall yesterday we wrote about how Ford will be marketing their first battery-electric F-150 truck, the F-150 Lightning, and how a bigshot at JD Power suggested that they would “try to make it apolitical.” I heard this, and immediately leapt into action to create, on spec, a whole new set of trim levels and packages that would help keep the F-150 Lightning “apolitical.” Unfortunately, I got it all wrong.
See, I made the foolish mistake of equating “apolitical” with “neutrally political,” because anyone who has ever seen F-150s out in the wild knows that, if you’re going to see any sort of political or religio-political messaging on F-150 trucks in the wild, it’s far more likely to be something like this:
You know, full of traditionally more right-leaning American symbols like flags and Jesuses and eagles and crosses and big, outstretched hands and sunsets and all that. No judgements — people can put whatever they like on their trucks — but I assumed that if the goal was to be apolitical, maybe Ford wanted to offer some counterbalances to this more prominent truck-based narrative, something that might balance the scales a bit.
I now realize that, no, that’s not what they meant at all. Ford seems to think the fact the truck runs on electrons instead of gasoline or diesel is already somehow of a potential more left-leaning political statement, as absurd as that is, and so is eager to avoid any sort of political-seeming implications at all.
So, what this means is that all the hard work I did on spec for Ford’s possible F-150 political-neutralizing agenda is now useless. But I’m going to show you anyway, because it’s already done, and maybe some private F-150 Lightning owner may choose to try one of these out.
Here’s what I came up with:
I figured Ford would want some sort of alternative to the current high-end F-150 King Ranch edition, because that King Ranch name feels pretty monarchist, so it’ll need some sort of counterbalance.
Enter the Ford F-150 Lightning Collective Farm Edition! This would have all of the capable ruggedness of the King Ranch, but also an unshowily-luxurious interior that one would associate with a successful collective farm, maybe even with a little bit of Kibbutz flair.
It would offer bench seating front and rear, along with a pair of jump seats in back, because it’s all about the collective, right, and you sometimes need to haul around a lot of Fellow Travelers.
If the Collective Farm Edition would be the high-end version, I figured we’d need some kind of sporty edition as well, with a tough name, something that could be a rough counterpart to the Tremor edition F-150s. That’s what the Marxman would be!
The Marxman name of course sounds tough and sporting, like marksman, but also has that Marx in there, for Karl Marx, father of Communism, and his iconic face would be a door decal, along with the big MARXMAN stripe kit.
There’s no tougher truck to plow through the crumbling remains of the withering-away state!
Finally, I thought a cool, more modern and high-tech option, something that might appeal to the Gen-Zs out there would be this Noam-Ad Edition, a F-150 Lightning with all the high-tech options and would include a full-size mannequin of linguist/philosopher/social and political critic Noam Chomsky permanently bolted into the passenger seat.
The Chomsky mannequin would have a large speaker in his abdomen connected to an independent 5G connection that would stream, nonstop, audio files of Chomsky’s collected works, played at a loud, unchangeable volume. Maybe the mannequin should get uncomfortably hot, too, or emit a piercing shriek at random intervals, just to be sure people can’t just tune it out.
Also, the Chomsky mannequin would likely allow travel in HOV lanes.
Well, it doesn’t look like it’ll matter, anyway. I completely misread Ford’s intentions here. I suppose if any other automaker is interested in any of these editions or trim packages, you can just let me know.
Just contact me soon. This prototype Noam Chomsky mannequin is so loud and it’s driving me fucking insane, I have to get it out of here.