Flash Mob: Ford Introduces F-150 Lightning Flash

Yes, I had to check the calendar to learn if this is April Fool’s Day. It is not. Ford announced this morning a new trim for their all-electric pickup truck. It has an extended range (320-mile) battery, popular equipment, and a price tag right at $70,000. 

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NHTSA Expanding Investigation Into Ford EcoBoost Engines

On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it would be expanding its investigation into late-model Fords equipped with EcoBoost engines. What initially started as a probe into 2021 model-year Broncos equipped with 2.7-liter turbocharged engines has evolved into a much broader look into several other models and the larger 3.0-liter EcoBoost motor.

Last summer, the NHTSA was prompted to launch an investigation into 2021 Ford Broncos after nearly 30 complaints were issued about the 2.7-liter motor cutting out at highway speeds. This was accompanied by a few petitions demanding the agency take action, prompting the NHTSA to launch a formal investigation. At the time, regulators were fretting over the possibility of “catastrophic engine failure” due to a presumed defect with the intake valves.

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Build & Price Appears for 2024 Ford F-150

A revamping of this nation’s best-selling vehicle (well, the half-ton portion of those numbers, anyway) is always worth a few words. The build-and-price tool for the 2024 Ford F-150 is now live, meaning we can poke around in what Ford asserts is a streamlined ordering process in which the number of buildable combinations has been cut by 90 percent compared to last year.

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First Look: 2024 Ford F-150

In Detroit, the Truck Wars never sleep. All the players enjoy nothing more than beating each other over the head with power outputs, towing capacity, and what they think is the Next Great Gadget™. For 2024, Ford is re-upping the F-150 with a midcycle refresh – and answering GM and Ram with an innovation of its own.

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Ford Teases Next F-150, Full Reveal Tomorrow

Can manufacturers tend to enjoy shrouding their upcoming vehicles in a cloud of ranchland dust or billowing tire smoke – depending on what they’re trying to keep under wraps, of course. Pickup trucks often get the former, which is exactly what was deployed for a brief teaser video for the next F-150 which popped up on Instagram just one day before the entire thing is revealed in Detroit.

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Consumer Reports Revises Recommendations, Puts F-150 on ‘Avoid’ List

Like ‘em or not, the musings of Consumer Reports can carry quite a bit of weight with John Q. Public when shopping for big-ticket items like a car or pickup truck. This month’s issue featured machines in numerous categories slapped with an ‘avoid’ label – including America’s best-selling vehicle.

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Ford Performance Introduces 700hp Kit for F-150

It’s been ages since the venerable 5.0L V8 engine has been the F-150’s volume seller, but that hasn’t stopped some gearheads deep within the skunkworks of Ford Performance from coming up with a relatively affordable supercharger kit for the mill – one which cranks the wick to 700 horsepower.

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Ford F-Series Continues Its Sales Streak

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A line of pickup trucks from Dearborn is the best-selling vehicle in America. There’s a very good chance you have indeed heard this before; after all, it’s been happening for 41 years. 

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Ford Jacks Sticker on F-150 Lightning

Prices of everything are going up these days – food, gasoline, our Managing Ed’s subscription to Utne Reader – and vehicles are not immune. We’re not just talking about the haywire used car market or greedy dealer markups, either; Ford has seen fit to hike its asking price for the dandy F-150 Lightning. Again.

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Lightning Strikes: Ford Jacks Sticker of EV Pickup … Again

Do you remember when suits at Ford breathlessly announced their all-electric F-150 Lightning was priced at a sliver under $40,000? Pepperidge Farms remembers – and TTAC does, too. Hot on the heels of a price increase two months ago, the least expensive Lightning now stickers for an alarming $53,749.

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2021 Ford F-150 First Drive: Now With Even More Torque

Ford Motor Company’s 2021 Model Year is full of new trucks, crossovers, and SUVs. The one hundred and seventeen-year-old company has a renewed focus on these profitable categories while no longer offering a sedan in North America. The Bronco, Bronco Sport, and Mustang Mach-E expand Ford’s vehicle portfolio while adding new segments for the brand. These are all very important products for the future of Ford Motor Company. However, none of those vehicles provide the company with the same level of revenue as the other new vehicle in the 2021 lineup; the 2021 Ford F-150.

It’s safe to say that the F-150 is Ford’s most important product. It has been the best-selling vehicle in America since 1977 and is in a segment where average transaction prices are near $50,000. In 2014, in order to create a more capable and more fuel-efficient truck, Ford moved the thirteenth-generation F-150 to an all-aluminum exterior. But between that release and today, the full-sized truck segment has become even more competitive. General Motors released an all-new Silverado 1500 and Sierra 1500 and FCA introduced a brand new RAM 1500.

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Rare Rides: A 1991 Ford F-150, Pace Truck and PPG

In what is assuredly the most Nineties looking Rare Ride to date, today’s Ford F-150 wears its decade loud and proud. Let’s find out more about this one-off pace car.

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2018 Ford F-150 Platinum 4X4 SuperCrew - Power Cruising

Part of the appeal of pickup trucks is that they can be many things to many people.

Tow machine to haul your boat? Check. Home-improvement aid? Sure, throw those 2x4s in the back. Guarantee that your friends will call you when they need help moving, even if they never call you any other time? Sure. Cowboy Cadillac? If you like cruising the streets of Texas in comfort, pardner.

Ford’s F-150 is already at least perceived as doing all those things well – Ford doesn’t sell approximately a zillionity billion for no reason – and adding a diesel powertrain to the mix doesn’t hurt.

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No Fixed Abode: Auto Shows In The Time Of Icebergs

I left Detroit at 4:51AM on Tuesday morning, pointed south for a three-hour drive that would terminate with the beginning of my workday. I could have taken the morning off, but I like to surround my auto shows with a little bit of deliberate misery, lest I inadvertently become too comfortable in the entirely artificial universe of public relations and journalist-pampering that seems to gain steam every year even as the rest of the event comes to resemble the petal-dropping Enchanted Rose in the spare wing of the Beast’s castle. Thus the 4 AM wakeup and the trudge out to the frozen parking lot, hunchbacked with suit bags and audibly creaking from every joint, Danger Girl trailing behind me with the wide-eyed stare common to prisoners of war and victims of spousal abuse, even if it’s mostly musical in nature.

We were not the only people starting our morning, and our truck, before dawn. Long-time TTAC readers may remember that General Motors and a few other automakers pay the travel expenses of quite a few autojournos in exchange for obtaining control of their narratives. Most of them arrive a few days before the actual show, all the better to maximize the free meals and curated experiences. On Saturday, while my son and I were driving up to a skatepark in Cleveland for an evening’s worth of BMX riding, I’d seen a former colleague of mine whining on Instagram about the less-than-five-star nature of his complimentary accommodations at the GM Renaissance Marriott. The only way I could think of to register my disappointment was to change my own hotel reservation to the absolute cheapest room available on Hotels.com: $47 a night for the Allen Park Motor Lodge.

The motel, and the room, turned out to be kinda-sorta okay, although the bed didn’t really make the grade for two people with a hardware store’s worth of screws and bolts in their bones. Here’s the interesting part: I’d expected that most of my fellow motel-dwellers would be engaged in some form of recreational depravity, but in actuality the bulk of them were construction and service-industry workers taking advantage of the weekly rates. They were early to bed and early to rise. Our work-truck white Silverado, parked in a line of pickups that stretched all the way across the motel’s road frontage, was notable only for being slightly newer than the rest. As we backed out of our spot, I saw a few Carhartt-clad fellows trudging out to the Colorados and F-150s and Rams, tool belts slung over their shoulders, rubbing their eyes and exhaling cloudy yawns of crystallized steam towards the moon.

Back to life, back to reality. But there was a bit of irony in it for me, because this Detroit show was the first one in a long time to acknowledge the connection between the polished artifice of the press-event turntable and the early-morning trudge to one’s truck.

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Ford Patents New Electric Slid(ing Pickup Bed)

Because of Ford’s new patent, we may soon wonder how we ever got anything out of our truck beds.

Ford has filed for a patent for a “sliding platform” in the bed of pickup trucks. The platform will be powered by a drive assembly, labeled an electric machine, coupled to the engine and transmission, possibly from a hybrid F-150.

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