The lightning is awesome, except the embarrassingly bad infotainment system.

[detansinn]

This is such a troll thread. I had a friend (long-time Tesla fanboy) riding with me in my F150 Lightning for the weekend. While I have spent extended time with Tesla's as borrowed, loaners, and rentals in the past, it was interesting to hear the things that he was impressed by with the truck/infotainment.

• 360 Surround view. It's big and beautiful and extremely handy parking the truck. Tesla has all of the cameras to do this, but seems incapable of pulling it off.
• CarPlay. Tesla owners love to make excuses for this one, but the reality is that having CarPlay is better and the absence of CarPlay is a severe limitation of Tesla's infotainment system.
• FordPass. You want to blow a Tesla owner's mind? Be able to pay and utilize every major charging network without a separate app and payment setup. Ford doesn't get enough credit for being the only automaker to crack this nut.
• Speed. From all of the Tesla community bashing, he commented on how responsive the display was while we were driving, because you know what, it's totally fine. It's also especially nice to have a dashboard AND infotainment display as separate things.

Not infotainment, per se, but garnered comments

• Blue Cruise. Yes, it's not infotainment per se, but he was blown away that the system was truly hands free and required so little intervention. It was raining and there were no phantom braking or other ill-behaviors.
• Real World Range. Tesla's advertised range numbers and guess-o-meters are total BS. During our drive, my friend witnessed a 90% charge getting us 281-283 miles of real world range as we ran state of charge down into the low 30s.

I've put 30k miles on my 2023. I prefer Ford's navigation over anything in CarPlay. I do my own route planning, but do use the truck navigation between chargers. I don't give a crap about Karaoke. I don't sit in my truck while it charges. I stretch my legs and get back onto the road, because it's not like the stops are that long anyway. I bought the Lightning to use it as a truck. Good infotainment, 1) Just works, 2) Disappears as part of the driving experience.

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