A demonstration of the vehicle-to-vehicle charging capability of the Ford F-150 Lightning.
Among the many ways Ford is hoping to advance the notion of all-electric vehicles when its F-150 Lightning pickup truck hits the market next year is with an innovative vehicle-to-vehicle recharging system that the company is demonstrating in prototypes at its Lightning assembly center in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford disclosed that its 2022 Lightning and F-150 PowerBoost Hybrid trucks will use Ford’s Pro Power Onboard 240-volt outlet — and their onboard generator and high-capacity battery system — to provide high-energy emergency power sources during an outage or to top off an EV battery for a neighbor.
“You can’t overestimate the importance of this,” Darren Palmer, Ford’s general manager of battery electric vehicles, told me and a couple of other journalists during a recent tour of the plant. “There’s never been a system to go help other people like this. This system can charge any other [all-electric] vehicle at the same cycle, and it comes with all the equipment you need. It will charge at the same rate as a home system will.”
The vehicle-to-vehicle recharging capability of Lightning is just one way in which Ford is attempting to use its new pickup truck to attract traditional pickup-truck buyers to the new offering and, more broadly, to redefine its workhorse F-150 nameplate — the most popular vehicle in the U.S. market for decades — as a platform that will become even more multidimensional in its all-electric form.
“That is just getting [Ford] started” in its applications of bidirectional backup power in the Lightning, Soderborg said, noting that the truck also will be able to be used for “home energy management and grid balancing.”
The Ford Mobile Power Cord charger in the F-150 Lightning will be able to deliver Level-2 charging that’s estimated to add an average range of 20 miles per charging hour on Mustang Mach-E with extended-range battery and all-wheel drive, Ford’s existing all-electric model. It will add up to 13 miles of charge per hour on the upcoming Lightning, and will add an average range of 10 miles per charging hour to a Ford E-Transit low-roof cargo van.
Customers will easily be able to take advantage of this capability, Ford said, using a widely available power adaptor to link the Ford Mobile Power Cord to their truck. Once connected to the 240-volt Pro Power Onboard outlet, customers can use the Mobile Power Cord to charge a range of all-electric vehicles that use teh SAE J1772 charge port, including both the Ford EVs and vehicles from other manufacturers.
