The Ford F-150 Lightning Costs $100,000
Who will buy a Ford F-150 Lightning that costs $100,000? And how many does Ford think it can sell?
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The Ford F-150 Lightning is Ford’s electric vehicle (EV) flagship. The gasoline-powered version has been the top-selling vehicle in America for 40 years. This gives Ford a large potential customer base. However, the Lightning is expensive; a high-end version can cost $100,000. (These are the worst new cars for humans and the environment.)
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Ford has raised the price of the base version of the Lightning four times in the past year and a half. It blames the costs of components, which is an argument probably lost on most buyers. Ford also has had several production problems, which it says are now behind it.
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To date, Ford has only sold a few Lightnings, but it has geared up manufacturing to a level that can make 150,000 a year by the end of 2023. A challenge for Ford and other companies that have entered the EV market is that many Americans say they will not buy an EV when they get their next cars.
The F-150 Lightning comes in four models. The base price for the Pro is $59,974, while the base prices for the XLT and Lariat are $64,474 and $76,974, respectively. For the high-end Platinum, the base price is $98,074. With a few accessories, this rises above $100,000.
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Is there a market for a $100,000 pickup? Yes. Almost certainly, though, Ford can sell only a few thousand a year at that price point. The real question is how many Pro models it can sell. The base price for the gasoline-powered F-150 is $33,695. There are two other gas-powered F-150s prices below the Lightning Pro.
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Ford’s push to sell the Lighting has another hurdle. A price war has started among the EV makers. Tesla started its, probably as a way to keep market share. As other huge companies jockey for position, the EV price war will not disappear. Nevertheless, some people somewhere (likely very rich) will pay $100,000 for an electric pickup.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
