HAVE YOU PLUGGED IN A FORD LATELY?

With this month's release of the F-150 Lightning, the company is hoping to electrify new and traditional truck buyers alike, and-eventually—to replace its industry-defining gas-powered line

- Keith Naughton

When Ford began developing an electric version of its wildly popular F-150 pickup four years ago, many people doubted it could be as robust as the gas-powered brute. Some of them were inside the house. “We were dealing with a ton of skepticism internally,” says Linda Zhang, chief engineer on the project. “It couldn’t just be a battery on wheels. We wanted it to be a real American truck that does work.”

It also needed to add value, using electric power to do things a regular truck couldn’t. So Zhang asked her engineers to come up with features “that hadn’t been invented yet.” Some of the ideas they ran by consumer focus groups worked, like a truck-bed scale connected to a dashboard readout and to an LED taillight display showing available capacity. Others didn’t, like a “bed extender” that used a small elevator to lengthen the truck at the back. “People said, ‘I would just buy a longer truck if I needed that,’ ” Zhang says.

What wowed the consumers participating in Ford Motor Co.’s clinics was the engineers’ spin on an EV standby: the frunk. Already popularized by Tesla Inc. and featured in Ford’s Mustang Mach-E, the front trunk offers storage under the hood, where the internal combustion engine would otherwise be. But the Lightning engineers went to Texas with the concept. Their “Mega Power Frunk” had 14 cubic feet of space capable of holding 400 pounds of cargo, plus a deep well with a drain for iced beverages—ready for “front-gating,” as Ford calls it. (“Frail-gating” apparently didn’t make the grade.) “You can have a party on both ends,” says Suzy Deering, Ford’s head of marketing.