Enlarge / On February 9, Ford suspended shipments of model-year 2024 F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks to dealerships. (credit: Ford)

Ford has temporarily suspended new shipments of its model-year 2024 F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck to dealerships from its factory in Michigan. It issued the stop-ship order in early February, according to Automotive News, but it's not clear when Ford will lift the measure.

"We started shipping the first newly designed F-150 pickups to dealers last week. MY24 Lightnings started shipping last month. We expect to ramp up shipments in the coming weeks as we complete thorough launch quality checks to ensure these new F-150s meet our high standards and delight customers," Ford told Ars.

Exactly what the problem is with the MY24 F-150 Lightnings is unknown, and Ford says it will "ramp shipments once quality checks are completed."

Enlarge / Americans love pickup trucks, but most pickup-truck loving Americans are not ready to go electric yet. Meanwhile, there's almost nothing to buy if you want a smaller, cheaper EV. (credit: Ford)

For the last two years, a small "skunkworks" at the Ford Motor Company has been working on a low-cost electric vehicle platform, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. Farley revealed the existence of this new platform during the automaker's quarterly financial results call with investors on Tuesday evening. The company is rethinking its electrification strategy, having now faced up to the reality that the current crop of EVs are too expensive for mass-market adoption to take off.

Ford was early to market with its Mustang Mach-E crossover, itself the product of a skunkworks-style development process: an internal group called Team Edison, formed to add some excitement to what was originally going to be a more boring compliance car. The team also took the bold step of making a fully electric version of the country's bestselling vehicle, the F-150 pickup truck.

Demand for the electric F-150 Lightning appeared strong, but a series of price hikes has resulted in really expensive trucks languishing on dealer forecourts and Ford cutting production shifts to reduce output. The Mustang Mach-E is still selling, although with barely any growth year on year.

Enlarge / I normally prefer my performance cars on race circuits, but the Lightning Switchgear impressed this off-road racing novice. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

CONCORD, NC—The venerable pickup truck can play a multitude of roles these days. For some, it's nothing more than a work vehicle, something to carry around lumber or tools or tow a trailer full of equipment. For others, it's the new American family car. But some truck owners like to leave the tarmac behind to have a little fun in the wilderness. Mostly, that involves low-speed rock crawling, perhaps up the side of a steep mountain. But it doesn't have to be slow—vehicles like Ford's range of Raptors are designed to do highway speeds across expanses of desert wilderness, largely thanks to very clever dampers and plenty of suspension travel to munch up those bumps and bounces.

Ford is yet to make a Raptor version of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup, but we got an idea of what one could be capable of this week thanks to a ride in the Blue Oval's latest electric demonstrator, the F-150 Lightning Switchgear. It's the result of a collaboration between Ford Performance and RTR Vehicles, a tuning company founded and run by drifting champion and off-road racer Vaughn Gittin Jr., and while it's just a one-off for now, the Lightning Switchgear is a testbed for pushing the boundaries of what we can expect from electric trucks, Ford says. (You may remember RTR previously worked with Ford to create a 1,400-hp Mustang Mach-E in 2020.)

"This is going to focus on chassis and suspension. So to that end, just like you do with any good racing vehicle, you start with the tires," explained Sriram Pakkam, head of F1 and EV demonstrators at Ford.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

I seem to be thinking a lot about Ford's electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning. Earlier this week, we got the news of price cuts and price increases. Before that, there was a pending cut to planned production output. Taken as it is, it's just the all-electric version of America's favorite pickup—and arguably the best version unless you need to pull something on the end of a trailer hitch.

But the Lightning doesn't exist in a vacuum. Depending on who you talk to, it's a clever attempt to get Americans to go electric, an utterly familiar wrapper on a slab of new technology that, yes, still requires the owner to adjust their mindset a bit from the gasoline-powered way of thinking. To others, it's a white elephant, one that costs too much and languishes on dealership forecourts, proof positive that electrification is a thing other countries might bother with, but forget that here at home, cowboy.

I've never found life to be quite that simple, and neither is the Lightning. Here in Washington, DC, the vehicle remains a rare sight—the only time I've seen one in the wild, it belonged to the DC government's fleet of vehicles (its job was inspecting abandoned vehicles). Out west, it's much more common to see electric F-150s on the road, and last year, Ford sold about 40,000 Lightnings, despite halting production for a fire and then again to retool part of the line.

Enlarge / The Ford F-150 Lightning Pro gets a plainer front treatment than the more expensive trims. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Was Ars premature in calling the electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck the most important electric vehicle of the decade? At launch, it seemed like a no-brainer—an all-electric version of the nation's most popular four-wheel vehicle that rode better than any other F-150 and a starting price of just $40,000 sure sounded compelling. In practice, things haven't worked out quite that well. Today, we learned that F-150 Lighting prices are increasing for some trims, and others are being retired altogether.

When Ford first announced Lightning pricing in 2021, the range started at $39,974 for a Lightning Pro—the trim aimed at commercial customers—with the standard range battery, or $49,974 for the Lightning Pro with a larger battery capable of 300 miles of range. The F-150 Lightning XLT was the entry-level model for private customers, which originally cost $52,974, with more expensive Lariat and Platinum trims that topped out at $90,874.

But Ford raised those prices before too long, then raised them again. Coupled with a post-pandemic trend of outrageous additional dealer markups, this spelled bad news for F-150 Lightning sales—the entry-level F-150 Lightning Pro cost $59,974 by the middle of 2023, $20,000 more than the 2021 pricing. In July 2023, the automaker cut F-150 Lightning prices heavily, but prices remained significantly higher than at launch.

Enlarge / Electric Ford F-150 Lightnings being built at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan. (credit: Ford)

On Monday, Automotive News reported that Ford's suppliers have been told by the automaker that from January it is halving the production rate of its F-150 Lightning from 3,200 trucks a week down to 1,600 trucks a week.

Ford debuted a fully electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck in 2022. You'd be hard-pressed to tell the electric F-150 Lightning from a gas- or diesel-burning F-150—bar some aerodynamic detailing here and there, they all use the same body, and the EV hides its batteries neatly between the chassis rails.

That conservatism in design appeared to be a winning strategy with the pickup crowd. Ford's order books were flooded with over 200,000 reservations well before the truck hit the streets, spurring the automaker to announce last January that it would double its original production plan and aim for an annual production rate of 150,000 trucks a year.

Enlarge / It's a hefty plug, but it has to be so that an F-150 Lightning can send power back to the home through an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro. (credit: Ford)

Modern EVs have some pretty huge batteries, but like their gas-powered counterparts, the main thing they do is sit in one place, unused. The Ford F-150 Lightning was built with two-way power in mind, and soon it might have a use outside emergency scenarios.

Ford and Resideo, a Honeywell Home thermostat brand, recently announced the EV-Home Power Partnership. It's still in the testing phases, but it could help make EVs a more optimal purchase. Put simply, you could charge your EV when it's cheap, and when temperatures or demand make grid power time-of-use expensive (or pulled from less renewable sources), you could use your truck's battery to power the AC. That would also help with grid reliability, should enough people implement such a backup.

The F-150 Lightning already offers a whole-home backup power option, one that requires the professional installation of an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro and a home transfer switch to prevent problems when the grid switches back on. Having a smart thermostat allows for grid demand response, so the F-150 would be able to more actively use its vehicle-to-home (V2H) abilities.