stimpy
Well-known member
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I picked up my Lightning Lariat ER from Granger on Monday and drove it 1100 miles home. Here are might thoughts after 2 days with it.
First off Granger is a great dealer and everyone there is awesome. Thank you!
Updated to add Charge summaries.
Overall, it is a great truck.
Driving: It drives and rides great. I'm used to EVs and one petal driving, so I just needed to adjust a little to the differences between the Lightning and my Tesla.
The only thing is that the regenerative braking transition isn't as smooth as I'm used to, which I only noticed in a short stretch of stop-and-go traffic.
I didn't like all the animations in the driver's consol, such as the speed bar getting larger or the power\battery meter changing to a steering wheel when hands-free driving was activated. I thought they were unnecessary and distracting. I wish it was more minimalist and largely static, I guess more like a traditional gauge cluster.
Interior: Pretty much the same as the ICE F-150. The Lariat has everything I would have ordered and more, I'm very happy with the feature set, but I paid for it at $80k.
However, I wish they did was get rid of the gear shifter and start button, which are both unnecessary in my opinion. I would have preferred a simple shifter stalk or button on the steering wheel and no start button at all. Simply pressing the break petal should start the car and then it should just turn off as you walk away, simple as that. Also, in my Tesla, sometimes I forget to put it in park and open the driver's door and I like that it automatically puts the car in park when I do that.
Blue Cruise: There is a thread about this: Upgrading to Blue Cruise & First Major Road Trip w/ Blue Cruise | F150gen14.com -- 2021+ Ford F-150, Lightning EV, Raptor Forum (14th Gen) | Owners, News, Discussions
My experience was similar. I feel like BC attention monitor is to sensitive, almost to the point where I get frustrated and turn it off.
On the plus side, almost all of the 1100 trip was covered by hands free. The downside is that hands free switches off for short stretches of road or randomly disengages lane centering and throws an alert. You also need to be careful as it tried to ver off onto an exit as the highway split.
It's currently pretty rudimentary, but covers most of what I like from driver assistance, especially long road trips like this one.
I would say that it's pretty similar to Tesla's basic autopilot, but tends to disengage more often and doesn't try to recenter if you drift a little out of the lane during a lane change.
I have been using navigate on autopilot for 3 years and it's not "hands free" but does much more of the driving for me than BC Hands Free does. There is a ton of room for improvement here, but I would still say it's adequate for what I use it for.
Build quality: This is also good. I went top to bottom on the truck and couldn't find any issues.
Infotainment: Overall, I would say that Sync 4A is pretty good, but it was a bit cumbersome to find some of the settings I was looking for.
However, once I set things up it was easy to use. For the most part everything I needed to access while driving was easily accessible.
The built in Alexa was cool and I see myself using it mostly for playing streaming music, but I'm not sure how I feel about having to pay for it after the 3 year initial subscription expires. I would probably just switch to using only CarPlay at that point. Same goes for the connected navigation.
Route Planning: For the most part I used ABRP to plan out my stops, which was very conservative as I hopped from one EA charger to the next. I mostly just put the next waypoint into Google Maps through carplay and went with that, but I also tried the built-in navigation which planned stops for me on one leg of the trip, which was consistent with the ABRP plan for that leg. It might have been a missed opportunity not using the built-in navigation for the whole trip, but I wanted control over my route for this first trip.
Charging: I used EA DCFCs while on the road and a L2 charger at my hotel on Monday night, which I found on plug share. The EA network, while a little sparse, was adequate to get me home, but it would be nice to have more options along the route. I had a couple shorter legs because I the next charger was just outside my range. Of all the stops I made, only first one had issues. there were 4 chargers and 2 were out of order and 1 would only charge at 33KWs. I was lucky to find one that got up to full speed or I would have been there for hours.
Additionally, one of the setbacks of a less efficient vehicle with a larger batter is that I didn't get a full charge overnight like I'm used to. This is not a surprise, just an observation for anyone used to a more efficient EV. I pulled ~6.6KWs on the L2 charger overnight and got from about 35% to 77%, which was sufficient to get me through the next DCFC. I even had some buffer because the efficiency was much better on day 2.
I hope more hotels install chargers, this is a big plus for me and I will always choose a hotel with a charger over one without while driving and I'm willing to pay a little more. With bigger batteries coming out, I also hope they put higher speed chargers, preferably 48amps.
One thing I don't like about Lightning charging is that I could not find the charge rate either in the vehicle or the app. I like to see how fast it's charging and that is something they need to add to the interface for both DCFC and L2.
I was forced to use the EA app for a couple charges at the and I like the additional information the EA app gives for charge sessions.
Blue Oval charge network: This is a gimmick, they are trying to pass of the EA charge network as something integrated with Ford, it is not. The plug to charge worked fine while I was using the bundled charge credits, but I ran into an issue as soon as I tried to pay for my first charging session. After many calls and getting redirected many times, often to the wrong extension, I spent hours of the phone with unhelpful customer support representative.
Update on Customer Service: so I eventually spoke with someone who cared about helping and even called back to check on on how things were going and make sure I was good. I told her about the bug I found with the CC processing and she said that she would pass on my info to the IT team and update the Troubleshooting guide.
I hope no one here ever needs charging support from Ford because they have a strict playbook and won't (can't) do anything other than what's in the book. I couldn't even get them to open a ticket with their IT team when my payment wouldn't process, they just kept telling me to update the card on the Ford website over and over again. Luckily, I was able to activate the EA charger through the app and then quickly plug it in to get it to authorized through my EA account and not the plug to charge network. It tells you to plug in first, then it talks to the car, then asks you to activate the charger, which wouldn't work after Ford paused my account due to the payment error.
Long story short, when I finally got home I figured out that there was a bug in Ford's website, so when I updated my account info using my phones web browser it didn't update in the back end system. I don't know how this happened, because I gave it a good card when I enrolled in plug to charge, but for some reason it defaulted to using an old card on my account that I had already tried to remove. I figured this out while using the app, I clicked on connected services for the Lightning and it took me to the same account page I had been updating my card on, except that it had a different card on it than what was in the website. So, I updated it in the app and it started to work. Interestingly, when I updated the app it wiped out the info that was in my account on the website and overwrote it with the new info. That whole ordeal was enough to turn me off from plug to charge through the blue oval network. Additionally, if you do much DCFC though EA, you probably want to join the EA charging plus membership for the discount. It pays for itself after pretty much one charge a month and there doesn't seem to be a way to subscribe through Ford. I also wanted to point out that paying by the minute in PA was significantly cheaper than by the KWh elsewhere. I paid a third as much for the same amount of energy at the pay per min charger.
Charge Curve: Using EA 350KW chargers it quickly ramped up to 160KWs and stayed there until maybe 50% then dropped to 120KWs or so, then down to about 100KWs at 70%. At 80% it falls off a cliff down to 60KWs and drops quickly after that. I think it was at 30KWs the one stop I needed to get to 90% to get to the next charger. Biggest thing here is cooling the battery during charging, especially on hot days. I would say go with the Max tow package just for the added battery cooling as this seemed like a limiting factor when I was charging in 97 degree heat on Monday afternooon.
Efficiency: I was a little discouraged on day 1 when I saw the efficiency drop throughout the day from 2.1 m\kwh to start down to 1.8 m\kwh by the end. Edit to add that I had cruse set at 70-72 almost all of the trip.
I think it was part due to the heat that was up around 97 degrees through the day, DCFC over 600 miles in a single day and some pretty strong cross winds I faced going through Illinois and Indiana. After dark it cooled off as I entered OH, so I did see a little better numbers at about 2.0 m\kwh, but still less than I was hoping even after the temp dropped. My theory is that cooling system was still working overtime from all the driving and charging in the heat throughout the day that even after dark it didn't really cool off enough to really matter until I stopped for the night. This is with the AT tire option, which are not very agressive and I don't feel like they affect the range much at all.
At 1.8 m\kwh during parts of day 1, I thought there was no way this thing is going to work out, but on day 2 things turned around. It was 76 degrees as I left Dayton, OH in the morning and my first 2.5 hour leg I got 2.3 m/kwh and it stayed there all day over about 500 miles into Mayland. The temp on day 2 was much cooler overall, only getting up to 82 degrees. This meant faster charging and what looks like much better efficiency. I also think that there was less cross wind on the second day contributing to the significant increase in range. That being said, I'm a little surprised by the range hit I took due to the heat. I've seen a pretty good reduction in my Tesla from a cold soaked batter, largely mitigated by pre-conditioning, but still noticeable. But I don't think I've seen such a large hit from cooling down the batter. This is probably because I really haven't done much for road trips with DCFC during extreme heat, so it's probably the combo of the two. We will probably see increase cooling effectiveness and efficiency from future designs.
Now that I've been driving around for a day at home, the city driving efficiency is very good. I've gotten 2.5-2.8 m/kwh around town under 50 mph and still 2.3 m/kwh driving to work, mostly highway at 65 mph.
Update: I just did a 150 mile trip to the Eastern shore of Maryland an was pleasantly surprised that I got 2.5 m/kwh on the trip at 55-65 mph. Which is better than I was planning for, so that’s a big win for overall usability. The more I drive it the more confidence I’m getting in it’s range estimates and I think the Lightning really will suit about 90% of people’s needs very well.
So a few closing thoughts: The truck is really good for a first iteration and it looks like Ford has put a lot of good effort into the EV drivetrain. Aero (and over all efficiency), could be better, but for now I would say it's good enough. The motor design is good, but based only on how it feels to drive, not nearly as good as Tesla (this is fine for now and I think will improve over time).
Charging speeds need to come up for such a large battery, 200KW would make a huge difference in charge times and cut down on time wasted charging.
For me personally, it also needs a Max pack option with ~180 KWh capacity and I would be comfortable towing my boat on longer trips.
I would also like the larger battery for camping off grid and or powering my house longer in an outage (I've never really needed this as I've only ever lost power once and only for a couple of hours, but it's a nice idea). I have a Rivian Max Pack reserved, so maybe I'll trade in for one of those, but who knows.
EA also needs to at least double their charge network to make it easier to get from stop to stop quickly and for towing, pull through chargers.
With a little more efficiency from the motors, 180KWh battery and 200KW+ charging with pull through chargers this would almost perfect.
I think that's everything I can think of.
First off Granger is a great dealer and everyone there is awesome. Thank you!
Updated to add Charge summaries.
Overall, it is a great truck.
Driving: It drives and rides great. I'm used to EVs and one petal driving, so I just needed to adjust a little to the differences between the Lightning and my Tesla.
The only thing is that the regenerative braking transition isn't as smooth as I'm used to, which I only noticed in a short stretch of stop-and-go traffic.
I didn't like all the animations in the driver's consol, such as the speed bar getting larger or the power\battery meter changing to a steering wheel when hands-free driving was activated. I thought they were unnecessary and distracting. I wish it was more minimalist and largely static, I guess more like a traditional gauge cluster.
Interior: Pretty much the same as the ICE F-150. The Lariat has everything I would have ordered and more, I'm very happy with the feature set, but I paid for it at $80k.
However, I wish they did was get rid of the gear shifter and start button, which are both unnecessary in my opinion. I would have preferred a simple shifter stalk or button on the steering wheel and no start button at all. Simply pressing the break petal should start the car and then it should just turn off as you walk away, simple as that. Also, in my Tesla, sometimes I forget to put it in park and open the driver's door and I like that it automatically puts the car in park when I do that.
Blue Cruise: There is a thread about this: Upgrading to Blue Cruise & First Major Road Trip w/ Blue Cruise | F150gen14.com -- 2021+ Ford F-150, Lightning EV, Raptor Forum (14th Gen) | Owners, News, Discussions
My experience was similar. I feel like BC attention monitor is to sensitive, almost to the point where I get frustrated and turn it off.
On the plus side, almost all of the 1100 trip was covered by hands free. The downside is that hands free switches off for short stretches of road or randomly disengages lane centering and throws an alert. You also need to be careful as it tried to ver off onto an exit as the highway split.
It's currently pretty rudimentary, but covers most of what I like from driver assistance, especially long road trips like this one.
I would say that it's pretty similar to Tesla's basic autopilot, but tends to disengage more often and doesn't try to recenter if you drift a little out of the lane during a lane change.
I have been using navigate on autopilot for 3 years and it's not "hands free" but does much more of the driving for me than BC Hands Free does. There is a ton of room for improvement here, but I would still say it's adequate for what I use it for.
Build quality: This is also good. I went top to bottom on the truck and couldn't find any issues.
Infotainment: Overall, I would say that Sync 4A is pretty good, but it was a bit cumbersome to find some of the settings I was looking for.
However, once I set things up it was easy to use. For the most part everything I needed to access while driving was easily accessible.
The built in Alexa was cool and I see myself using it mostly for playing streaming music, but I'm not sure how I feel about having to pay for it after the 3 year initial subscription expires. I would probably just switch to using only CarPlay at that point. Same goes for the connected navigation.
Route Planning: For the most part I used ABRP to plan out my stops, which was very conservative as I hopped from one EA charger to the next. I mostly just put the next waypoint into Google Maps through carplay and went with that, but I also tried the built-in navigation which planned stops for me on one leg of the trip, which was consistent with the ABRP plan for that leg. It might have been a missed opportunity not using the built-in navigation for the whole trip, but I wanted control over my route for this first trip.
Charging: I used EA DCFCs while on the road and a L2 charger at my hotel on Monday night, which I found on plug share. The EA network, while a little sparse, was adequate to get me home, but it would be nice to have more options along the route. I had a couple shorter legs because I the next charger was just outside my range. Of all the stops I made, only first one had issues. there were 4 chargers and 2 were out of order and 1 would only charge at 33KWs. I was lucky to find one that got up to full speed or I would have been there for hours.
Additionally, one of the setbacks of a less efficient vehicle with a larger batter is that I didn't get a full charge overnight like I'm used to. This is not a surprise, just an observation for anyone used to a more efficient EV. I pulled ~6.6KWs on the L2 charger overnight and got from about 35% to 77%, which was sufficient to get me through the next DCFC. I even had some buffer because the efficiency was much better on day 2.
I hope more hotels install chargers, this is a big plus for me and I will always choose a hotel with a charger over one without while driving and I'm willing to pay a little more. With bigger batteries coming out, I also hope they put higher speed chargers, preferably 48amps.
One thing I don't like about Lightning charging is that I could not find the charge rate either in the vehicle or the app. I like to see how fast it's charging and that is something they need to add to the interface for both DCFC and L2.
I was forced to use the EA app for a couple charges at the and I like the additional information the EA app gives for charge sessions.
Blue Oval charge network: This is a gimmick, they are trying to pass of the EA charge network as something integrated with Ford, it is not. The plug to charge worked fine while I was using the bundled charge credits, but I ran into an issue as soon as I tried to pay for my first charging session. After many calls and getting redirected many times, often to the wrong extension, I spent hours of the phone with unhelpful customer support representative.
Update on Customer Service: so I eventually spoke with someone who cared about helping and even called back to check on on how things were going and make sure I was good. I told her about the bug I found with the CC processing and she said that she would pass on my info to the IT team and update the Troubleshooting guide.
I hope no one here ever needs charging support from Ford because they have a strict playbook and won't (can't) do anything other than what's in the book. I couldn't even get them to open a ticket with their IT team when my payment wouldn't process, they just kept telling me to update the card on the Ford website over and over again. Luckily, I was able to activate the EA charger through the app and then quickly plug it in to get it to authorized through my EA account and not the plug to charge network. It tells you to plug in first, then it talks to the car, then asks you to activate the charger, which wouldn't work after Ford paused my account due to the payment error.
Long story short, when I finally got home I figured out that there was a bug in Ford's website, so when I updated my account info using my phones web browser it didn't update in the back end system. I don't know how this happened, because I gave it a good card when I enrolled in plug to charge, but for some reason it defaulted to using an old card on my account that I had already tried to remove. I figured this out while using the app, I clicked on connected services for the Lightning and it took me to the same account page I had been updating my card on, except that it had a different card on it than what was in the website. So, I updated it in the app and it started to work. Interestingly, when I updated the app it wiped out the info that was in my account on the website and overwrote it with the new info. That whole ordeal was enough to turn me off from plug to charge through the blue oval network. Additionally, if you do much DCFC though EA, you probably want to join the EA charging plus membership for the discount. It pays for itself after pretty much one charge a month and there doesn't seem to be a way to subscribe through Ford. I also wanted to point out that paying by the minute in PA was significantly cheaper than by the KWh elsewhere. I paid a third as much for the same amount of energy at the pay per min charger.
Charge Curve: Using EA 350KW chargers it quickly ramped up to 160KWs and stayed there until maybe 50% then dropped to 120KWs or so, then down to about 100KWs at 70%. At 80% it falls off a cliff down to 60KWs and drops quickly after that. I think it was at 30KWs the one stop I needed to get to 90% to get to the next charger. Biggest thing here is cooling the battery during charging, especially on hot days. I would say go with the Max tow package just for the added battery cooling as this seemed like a limiting factor when I was charging in 97 degree heat on Monday afternooon.
Efficiency: I was a little discouraged on day 1 when I saw the efficiency drop throughout the day from 2.1 m\kwh to start down to 1.8 m\kwh by the end. Edit to add that I had cruse set at 70-72 almost all of the trip.
I think it was part due to the heat that was up around 97 degrees through the day, DCFC over 600 miles in a single day and some pretty strong cross winds I faced going through Illinois and Indiana. After dark it cooled off as I entered OH, so I did see a little better numbers at about 2.0 m\kwh, but still less than I was hoping even after the temp dropped. My theory is that cooling system was still working overtime from all the driving and charging in the heat throughout the day that even after dark it didn't really cool off enough to really matter until I stopped for the night. This is with the AT tire option, which are not very agressive and I don't feel like they affect the range much at all.
At 1.8 m\kwh during parts of day 1, I thought there was no way this thing is going to work out, but on day 2 things turned around. It was 76 degrees as I left Dayton, OH in the morning and my first 2.5 hour leg I got 2.3 m/kwh and it stayed there all day over about 500 miles into Mayland. The temp on day 2 was much cooler overall, only getting up to 82 degrees. This meant faster charging and what looks like much better efficiency. I also think that there was less cross wind on the second day contributing to the significant increase in range. That being said, I'm a little surprised by the range hit I took due to the heat. I've seen a pretty good reduction in my Tesla from a cold soaked batter, largely mitigated by pre-conditioning, but still noticeable. But I don't think I've seen such a large hit from cooling down the batter. This is probably because I really haven't done much for road trips with DCFC during extreme heat, so it's probably the combo of the two. We will probably see increase cooling effectiveness and efficiency from future designs.
Now that I've been driving around for a day at home, the city driving efficiency is very good. I've gotten 2.5-2.8 m/kwh around town under 50 mph and still 2.3 m/kwh driving to work, mostly highway at 65 mph.
Update: I just did a 150 mile trip to the Eastern shore of Maryland an was pleasantly surprised that I got 2.5 m/kwh on the trip at 55-65 mph. Which is better than I was planning for, so that’s a big win for overall usability. The more I drive it the more confidence I’m getting in it’s range estimates and I think the Lightning really will suit about 90% of people’s needs very well.
So a few closing thoughts: The truck is really good for a first iteration and it looks like Ford has put a lot of good effort into the EV drivetrain. Aero (and over all efficiency), could be better, but for now I would say it's good enough. The motor design is good, but based only on how it feels to drive, not nearly as good as Tesla (this is fine for now and I think will improve over time).
Charging speeds need to come up for such a large battery, 200KW would make a huge difference in charge times and cut down on time wasted charging.
For me personally, it also needs a Max pack option with ~180 KWh capacity and I would be comfortable towing my boat on longer trips.
I would also like the larger battery for camping off grid and or powering my house longer in an outage (I've never really needed this as I've only ever lost power once and only for a couple of hours, but it's a nice idea). I have a Rivian Max Pack reserved, so maybe I'll trade in for one of those, but who knows.
EA also needs to at least double their charge network to make it easier to get from stop to stop quickly and for towing, pull through chargers.
With a little more efficiency from the motors, 180KWh battery and 200KW+ charging with pull through chargers this would almost perfect.
I think that's everything I can think of.
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