Although Ford officially announced its electric pickup after Tesla showed off ts Cybertruck, the Detroit automaker has now delivered its first production model before Tesla even started building its truck.
Ford officially delivered its first F-150 Lightning to Nicholas Schmidt on Thursday, reports Bloomberg. The very first example now calls Standish, Michigan, a town with fewer than 1,500 inhabitants, home.
Schmidt is the chief technology officer at a grid optimization startup and will be giving up his standard F-150 in order to make room in his driveway for the F-150 Lightning, which is finished in silver to match his family’s Airstream trailer. And Schmidt said that although this is a watershed moment for Ford, he’ll just be treating his truck like, well, a truck.
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“We live in the woods, and I’m looking at a cornfield next to me here that was planted,” he said. “We’ll be chopping wood and hauling stuff back and forth, as well as towing a trailer.”
Schmidt isn’t quite an old-school pickup driver, though. The CTO already owns a Tesla Model 3 and has a deposit down on a Cybertruck.
“Nobody could believe it because it was the ugliest thing they’d ever seen,” he said. “But it was $100 and I figured, you know, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Despite Tesla’s early confidence about the truck, though, three years since being announced and delivery dates still haven’t been set. That has given manufacturers like Ford and others an opportunity to swoop in and claw back some EV market share.
“When I bought the Tesla a few years ago, my family was real apprehensive, as farmers, just not buying into it,” said Schmidt. “So when there were pickup trucks coming out that were going to be EVs, I said, ‘whichever one comes first, I’ll buy it.’”
Ford will no doubt hope that more customers feel that way given the importance of the pickup segment to its bottom line and its commitment to electrification.
