6 month update on the Lightning...
There is a lot of hate out there for EV's in general, but I have to say this is is the best/funnest/most convenient vehicle I have ever owned or even driven. Despite Ford falling short on the software side of things, the truck is amazing, and fits our lifestyle/location/usage-case just perfectly.
Power is unbelievable...you can literally race normal cars while towing the Mac. The power is always immediately available, no downshifting or revving, just immediate. You can actually spin all four tires when you step on the "gas", so have to be a bit careful of that. After a few weeks I got that part out of my system, a good thing, because you can burn up a set of tires in very short order in a 6,000 lb vehicle that has 775 ft-lb of torque at 0 rpm. EVs are known to run through tires much faster than ICE vehicles, although you can control that to a great extent by just not driving agressively.
Range...yes, here's the problem. EV's are city vehicles; if you drive in the city and charge at home, then they're great. For long range driving, or worse, long range towing, they're just not ready. The public charging infrastructure isn't ready. Winter makes things 30% worse, or so, depending on how one manages the heating. However, I will say that towing the boat through the city, at city speeds and using regen to its best capacity, the range is still quite good, at about 70% of the advertised capacity. There is a lot of thought that has to go in to driving an EV to its max efficiency; stopping using max regen, careful acceleration, conservation of momentum. But I find that sort of thing to be quite fun.
Cost to charge...well, we have a grid-tied 8.5kW solar system that produces 11,000 kwhr per year that I installed for $18,000 CDN. That's about twice the energy required to drive the Lightning for 20,000 km, so the remainder goes into reducing my house energy bill. Combined with some free charging at work, our annualized electricity bill has decreased from $350 per month to $230 per month after we bought the Lightning and the solar system. Fast-charging on public DC stations is expensive, though, and frequent fast charging would negate a big chunk of the fuel cost savings. If we didn't have the solar, at our rate of $0.11/kwhr, it would cost us about $600 per year to drive 20,000km. My 6-month lifetime average energy use for the Lightning is 4.0 km/kwhr, which includes all driving I've done since new. I expect that will get worse as I go through the winter, and my guess based on the last few weeks of below-freezing temperatures is that I'll end up at 3.4 km/kwhr for the full year. I've seen as high as 8.5 km/hwhr on nice spring days, and as low as 3.1km/kwhr on cold day with cabin heat on high.
Ford has a hands-free driving system called Blue-Cruise, and it's absolutely amazing. There's a sensor that checks if your eyes are on the road, and if you're looking elsewhere for a certain time period it reminds you to look forward again. A quick glance at the road ahead and you can go back to enjoying the scenery. It's that good, and I hear Ford is about to release an update that includes auto lane-change and Semi-Truck detection/reaction/positioning. The Blue-Cruise system puts the Nissan ProPilot system on our Pathfinder to shame. On our trip through Quebec, I found myself to be much less tired at the end of a long drive, and that I really enjoyed being able to look at the scenery that we were driving through. We made it our "yes" tour, where we said "yes" to stop and turn around to visit any point of interest. Interesting architecture? Stop and turn around. Lookout? Stop and turn around. Blueberry bakery in the back of a residential house? Stop and turn around.
The Lightning also has a 7kW 240V output that can be used to power the house during a blackout. I've done that a couple of times, and it's great to be cooking with lights on without having to go start and maintain a gas generator. I calculated that a full charge on the vehicle would power our house (minus the electric heat) for a good week, possibly more.
Tailgating with the Lightning is awesome, too. We did that this year at my son's football games, and between the induction stove, coffee maker, and the powered piezoelectric cooler, we were keeping the whole team of kids and parents "charged".
We did a 2500 km trip through the center of Quebec this summer, doing a loop around Lac St. Jean, down to Tadoussac, through Quebec City, back up to Alma, and home to Montreal. We brought a bed tent, which has a ground-based extension for the kids, and enjoyed being able to stop wherever and still cook and run a heater and lights through the night. Even in August, temps were in the 40s at night, that far north. Keeping the vehicle charged throughout the journey required a bit more forethought than with a normal vehicle, but with the aid of an app called Plugshare, we never had to wait to charge, and were never at risk of running out of electrons. It takes a bit of getting used to, but after a few thousand km on the road we had zero range anxiety. I understand, of course, that the charging infrastructure in Quebec is actually quite good, with our province-owned power company doing a reasonably good job of making fast-chargers available.
From our trip, on the Saguenay Fjord:
At a campsite in St. Felicien
