Finance

Joe Biden Behind The Wheel Of New Electric Ford F-150 Is Watershed Moment For Electrified Future

Ford did not release the specifications for the F-150 Lightning during Biden’s visit, but the president did let it slip that the truck can accelerate from zero to 60 in about 4.4 seconds.

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

On May 18, President Joe Biden toured a Michigan Ford plant as part of his efforts to promote his proposed infrastructure package. Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan includes $174 billion to help facilitate the development and adoption of American-made electric vehicles.

“The future of the auto industry is electric,” said Biden as part of his remarks inside the plant. “There’s no turning back.”

The fun part came later though, when the president was given the chance to actually get behind the wheel of the new all-electric F-150 Lightning. Biden made an unscheduled stop at a Ford driving course, where he was seen tooling around in one of the new Ford electric pickup trucks.

“This sucker’s quick,” a visibly delighted Biden said through his rolled-down window after pulling up to a waiting pod of reporters. He answered a few questions before easing forward … and then flooring it. The F-150 streaked ahead.

Tesla has done such a good job of mainstreaming electric vehicles that it is hard to see this for what it is: a watershed moment that quite easily could have never happened. It was only in 2008 that Tesla Motors released its first car, the all-electric Roadster. The doubters were many. Profitably producing an electric vehicle was thought to be impossible, and Tesla stock has repeatedly been the most shorted equity on Wall Street even after the company began posting profits.

But Tesla kept right on making new vehicles, and making money for its shareholders, until competitors couldn’t help but take notice. Chevy, Hyundai, Nissan, BMW, and even Jaguar all came out with their own electric models for the U.S. market. A number of electric pickup trucks are currently in development, including the Tesla Cybertruck from the company that started it all.

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But the rollout of the electric F-150 Lightning is something particularly special. The Ford F-150 light-duty full-size truck is the best-selling pickup in America, and has been for more than four decades. Electric vehicles are not just for the eccentric, they are not just for the wealthy, at least not anymore. If the F-150 is going electric, there really is no turning back.

Ford did not release the specifications for the F-150 Lightning during Biden’s visit, but the president did let it slip that the truck can accelerate from zero to 60 in about 4.4 seconds. Ford is set to release the full specs for the F-150 Lightning late in the day this Wednesday. Based solely on the amount of fun the president seemed to be having while driving it, the numbers for the new F-150 Lightning are probably going to be impressive.

Suddenly an America that doesn’t contribute far more than its fair share of greenhouse gas emissions seems within reach. Maybe even an America in which 107,000 people don’t die prematurely every year from the health effects of air pollution. And it might not even take dramatic sacrifices and changes to our way of life. Hell, maybe we can even have fun doing it, driving around in zippier vehicles that create good-paying jobs right here at home.

Electric vehicles are not a silver bullet. EVs are not going to take over the roads in an instant, and we face many environmental challenges beyond those that have to do with vehicle emissions. Still, because it took so much work, so much genius, so much slow and steady progress to get to this point, it can be easy to overlook the significance of a given moment. I guarantee though that if you could go back 20 years and tell someone that the president of the United States was going to be driving around in an electric F-150 in 2021, it would have been almost unbelievable news. That we are here, now, is something worth taking a few minutes to reflect upon, and celebrate.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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