January 31, 2022 Issue

Once again John Seabrook’s beloved Ford F-150 pickup appears in his writing. You’ll recall that’s what he was driving when he hit black ice, in his superb “Six Skittles” (April 9, 2018). Now, in “Green Giants,” in this week’s issue, he considers replacing it with an electric version, a Ford F-150 Lightning. And once again, it’s his personal experience of the product that makes his piece so engaging. He attends a car show in Austin, Texas, where the Lightning is on display. He notes, among other things, that the new truck has a “frunk” (“Instead of a hunk of throbbing, greasy metal up front, there’s a lockable storage space large enough to fit two sets of golf clubs, and equipped with a drain so that the frunk can be filled with ice and drinks”). 

He tours the Rouge Electric Vehicle Centre, in Dearborn, Michigan, where the Lightning is assembled:

We came to the largest of the robots, a Fanuc M-2000iA, which can lift a vehicle frame at least thirteen feet into the air. The robot deftly picked up the truck’s eighteen-hundred-pound Korean-made lithium-ion battery, which looked like a rooftop cargo-carrying case. The reinforced high-strength plastic shell contained hundreds of AA-battery-size cells filled with chemicals. The Fanuc placed the battery on the truck’s chassis, and the skillet floated farther down the line.

Most interestingly, he takes one of Ford’s new electric vehicles – a Mustang Mach-E – for a two-hundred-and-sixty-mile test-drive. His description of this trip is, for me, the highlight of the piece. And, as was the case in his wonderful “Scooter City” (April 26 & May 3, 2021), in which he a tries out an e-scooter, the experience is mixed. It starts well. He and his son, Harry, set out from Brooklyn. He notes that the car “can deliver microbursts of acceleration, without cycling through gears, in the way that an electric egg beater can go directly to the high-speed setting, skipping low and medium.” Seabrook enjoys these “microbursts of acceleration.” He says, 

My driver’s brain was far more engaged by these torquey sprints than by a steady rate of high speed. I’m pretty sure Cousin Charlie would have dug it. But the torque wasn’t truly satisfying until I turned on the “propulsion sound” in the “unbridled” mode (it’s a Mustang, remember), so that I heard the speed. Harry shook his head. O.K., Vroomer.

One thing they have to be mindful of is that the car needs to be recharged. At first, their search for a charging station goes smoothly. He writes,

The navigation system correctly calculated that if we drove to the Electrify America direct-current chargers in the Chicopee Marketplace mall, in western Massachusetts, we would have twenty-four per cent of battery life remaining. We arrived after nine, so the vast parking lot was mostly empty. The Mach-E’s G.P.S. led us to the chargers—four plugs in green-glowing, gas-pump-like stations next to a Home Depot. Could this be right? No one else was using them.

They plug in and walk to a restaurant. While they eat, Seabrook monitors the battery’s charging progress on his phone. That's a very cool detail. 

But as they drive north the temperature drops, and, as it does, the projected range of the vehicle keeps diminishing. Range anxiety sets in. Seabrook says, 

The navigation system apparently hadn’t figured this change in weather in its original calculation, which, at least to me, seemed neither seamless nor delightful. It began to rain. We were both showing signs of range anxiety by the time we arrived, at 11:30 p.m., nearing empty. We plugged into a regular outlet in the barn, in the dark.

The next day doesn’t go well. Seabrook writes,

The Mustang didn’t charge much overnight on my 120-volt outlet. The car’s navigation system—or the spotty rural cell coverage—failed to route me to the closest Electrify America chargers, across the state border in New Hampshire, and, for safety reasons, I couldn’t use the FordPass app on my phone to navigate while the car was moving. Ford’s charging infrastructure will inevitably improve as more E.V.s hit the road. Today wasn’t my day. I finally found the charging stations in the West Lebanon Walmart parking lot, but they weren’t working properly, and angry drivers were on the phone with customer service. It was still raining; puddles had formed in the depressions around the chargers, and my feet got wet while I was trying to get a hundred and fifty kilowatts flowing into my car, which isn’t as unsafe as it sounds.

Will Seabrook replace his old gas-fed F-150 with a new electric Lightning? He might not. Towards the end of the piece, he road-tests another electric pickup – Rivian’s futuristically designed R1T. He says, “Still, from my first glimpse of the truck’s front end I was smitten.” Smitten! Oh, oh, that doesn’t bode well for the Lightning. 

“Green Giants” provides an illuminating glimpse of the impending rise of the electric vehicle. I enjoyed it immensely.