Ford has repeatedly talked about its upcoming F-150 Hybrid, but the automaker used yesterday’s Deutsche Bank Global Automotive Conference to confirm plans for an electric variant.
According to The Detroit News, Ford’s president of global markets used the conference to reveal “We’re going to be electrifying the F-Series – battery electric and hybrid.” Jim Farley declined to elaborate, but said the move was designed to “futureproof” the company’s range of popular pickups.
The news of a battery electric pickup was unexpected and Fox News reached out to Ford’s North American product communications manager, Mike Levine, who confirmed Farley was indeed talking about “an all-electric F-150.”
Needless to say, this is pretty big news as the Ford F-150 has been America’s best-selling vehicle for years. Last year alone, the automaker sold over 909,000 F-Series trucks in the United States.
Little is known about the truck at this point, but the next-generation F-150 will be introduced in 2020. The company has already confirmed the redesigned truck will be offered with a hybrid powertrain and noted 90 percent of the manufacturing equipment used to make the current F-150, can be reused for the next-generation model. It remains unclear if the electric variant will be based on the next-generation F-150, but it seems likely.
The decision to offer an electric F-150 is interesting as GM’s vice president of global strategy, Mike Abelson, recently said “There will not be any AV/EV [autonomous / electric] pickups” coming from them. The chances of seeing an electric Ram also seem slim, but the company already offers an eTorque mild hybrid system on the 2019 Ram 1500.
There’s no word on when the electric F-150 will arrive, but it wouldn’t be the only electric pickup on the market. Rivian’s R1T is slated to go into production in 2020 and so is Bollinger’s B2 pickup. Tesla is also working on their own electric truck, but an exact launch date hasn’t been set in stone.
