Ford has been tight-lipped about details on the new all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning, but when the President asks you about it, I guess you answer. Turns out this bad boy weighs about 1,800 pounds.
As anyone knows, that’s about as much as the universal standard of measurement, a Volkswagen Beetle.
That’s the news from Reuters’ ever-vigilant David Sheparsdon:
This is an entertaining figure, certainly, as you can easily imagine Joe Biden laughing “that’s as much as a Volkswagen, Jack!” and then finger-gunning away from whichever Ford PR person he was talking to at the time.
It’s also a useful figure, as the weight of your EV’s battery does have some correlation to its capacity. It’s far from a perfect comparison, as different EV manufacturers get different power and range out of similar battery specs, but it’s something. What we can tell about the electric F-150's batteries weighing 1,800 pounds is that this is a lot of battery pack, even by the standards of the EV world.
It’s in line with what you’ll be getting from the other EV pickup truck hitting the roads soon, the Rivian R1T. Incidentally, Rivian is also backed by Ford.
Anyway, manufacturers don’t seem to post battery weight specs with great aplomb, but I did find this selection on the old standard of spec repositories TopSpeed. It was published when Rivian first announced it’d have a huge 180 kWh battery pack back in 2019:
Still, as bullish as I am of Rivian, a 180-kWh battery pack is a huge promise, literally and figuratively. Consider this: Tesla’s 85 kWh battery pack contains 7,104 lithium-ion battery cells and weighs 1,200 pounds. Now, there are ways for Rivian’s engineers to address the weight of the battery pack, but we’re still talking about a battery pack that contains 7,776 cells, all of which are linked together. Suppose that Rivian can keep the weight of the battery pack to somewhere in the vicinity of 1,500 to 1,800 pounds, that’s almost a ton on the battery pack alone. The good news is that it’s not an impossible task. Let’s look at another all-electric SUV that just started production: the Mercedes-AMG EQC. The German automaker’s first-ever, mass-produced all-electric vehicle uses an 80 kWh battery pack that already weighs 1,377 pounds. That’s half the power of the battery pack that Rivian plans to use in its models and the weight difference isn’t as ridiculous as it looks. There’s also Audi and its e-Tron SUV, which uses a more powerful 95 kWh battery pack compared to the EQC. It also weighs over 1,500 pounds, which is one of the heaviest in the market today. Take it a step further and look at the Chevrolet Bolt’s 60 kWh battery pack. It’s a third of what the Rivian’s 180 kWh capacity, but it’s also not as light as you think with its 960-pound weight.
We are yet to know all the specs on the F-150 Lightning but this does go to show it’ll be impressive. I mean, not as impressive as the GMC Hummer EV weighing as much as an elephant, but maybe that’s a good thing.