Why I regret buying a Ford Lightning! (EV Electric Truck)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey thanks for tuning in what in the world could possibly make me regret buying this beautiful piece of Machinery it's a 2023 Ford Lightning I waited almost two years for this and I finally get it and I'm kind of kicking myself just a little bit let me explain so there's been a couple of things one when you buy an electric truck you need what you need the ability to be able to charge it so you get a little bit mobile charger and I'll show you what that little mobile charger looks like when you buy the truck you get a mobile charger this is it we're gonna open it up so you can see what it looks like okay so I added this extension cord this is what I was talking about when I was talking about going up in the mountains and needing an extension cord this is the one I bought this is the actual four charger so you've got two ends you've got the 220 end that can go into the wall and these parts just fit on the end here or you've got the little tiny 110 charger end and both these just can kind of swap in and out really really easily and of course you've got the little plug now the thicker the thicker versions of this have a bigger plug on the bottom here so that that way you've got more amps can go into the vehicle but this is the mobile charger in all of its Glory it's uh it's great when you're in a pinch and you need something to keep you charged you need something a little heftier an 80 AMP pro charger is what they're called for the Fords this is the Ford charger and it's a great example of what you get for fast charging with your truck in order to get the pro charger you have to have purchased the truck makes sense only I had a friend that purchased his truck about five minutes before me or at least reserved it five minutes before me and he got his pro charger sent to him by Sunrun that's the vendor that Ford works with to uh to send it to him like three months in advance way before he ever got the actual truck so what in the world happened I purchased the truck I asked him if they can ship me the charger early and they say no you have to actually complete the purchase I you know I say okay that's fine I get it you know you don't want a whole bunch of these Pro Chargers being shipped off if somebody doesn't actually own the truck or if they don't end up buying the truck but after I purchased the truck supposedly there's this this thing that's supposed to happen where somebody's supposed to click a button that says the the truck has been purchased and now you're released to to send this charger I call Sunrun I have a conversation with them I get nothing first I get someone from a foreign country that has no access to anything one of my rules is never take no from somebody that can't give you yes I talk to them they can't do anything I ask for a call back they say we're going to call you back in about five business days because we're backed up I've already got this truck purchased I'm struggling I need this pro charger I I say that's not okay I end up like sending a tweet to the CEO of Sunrun and to Fort and their their team reaches out to me I'm like great they say they're going to resolve something I'm like cool looking forward to this getting resolved they end up calling me back and then telling me there's nothing they can do they just have to wait until it's marked uh as sold I'm like I'll send you the paperwork that shows that I purchased the truck I have all the paperwork everything I have you know the in the app it shows that I purchased the truck all of these different things they're like we're sorry there's nothing that we can do I said there's nobody over there at Sunrun that can make a good decision a reasonable good decision and they basically say no I end up talking to the supervisor of the specialist that was assigned to me and this is like I've spent hours on the phone now I've spent several hours just talking to people at Sunrun trying to convince them even though I'm owed a charger that it's okay to send it to me I said can you imagine if you bought a gas car you spent all this money waited two years and then you get the car and there's nowhere to fill it up with gas or if you can fill it up it's like the slowest thing ever I was like that would be ridiculous just send me the the stinking charger I can't get it finally this this lady ends up calling me after a second tweet to the CEO and of Ford and Sunrun and she tells me she's going to try and work on it you know basically somebody needs to just click this button can't get anybody to click this button that says that I purchased the truck it's a month in finally she she says she's going to call me it's a Friday I don't hear from her it's it's after five I'm like great we're gonna deal with this again but as it would have it she texts me it's like six o'clock I'm like kudos to her for after hours reaching out to me and letting me know that she sent the charger I sent her a text back because she text me and I said hey how did it all work out crickets you go through all of that and you just kind of want just a little bit of validation just something to like explain what happened maybe makes you feel a little bit better nothing but in the end I did get my charger so it only took a month it was like one of the worst possible experiences with trying to get something that should be coming with you and your truck anyway but I will give the fact that whatever this lady did she was able to finally get it even though she never responded I still think Sunrun was a very horrible experience and very disappointed with the way it all worked out but I am happy that I finally got the charger so what's the other thing what is that what does that have to do with everything dread okay look if you have an electric truck and it's got a giant battery like this guy this is the extended range okay it's going to take a very long time to charge this truck anywhere that you go you have to charge it Ford made it so you really need to use their app in order to charge this well if you're going to use the app that's great if the app works the app only works like half the time you go and you set the times right that you want to charge your truck and I charge mine after midnight because that's when uh the electricity is the cheapest and you know I can fill it up with my with my pro charger now overnight you charge you put it in there you schedule it the whole bit I you know I'm used to a Tesla because that's what I owned before and it was seamless you just say hey charge after midnight it works not this fifty percent of the time it works a hundred percent of the time and I'm telling you like it's like the clunkiest app that I've ever seen not maybe maybe that's an exaggeration not that I've ever seen but one of the clunkiest apps that I've seen for sure for a car it works half the time it's very difficult the user interface is very very non-intuitive I think big opportunity for Ford here to to do something Ford if you're listening please fix your app make it work I'm gonna do a screenshot or a screen recording that'll show you my experience with the app and you can see exactly what I see which is going to absolutely drive you up a wall so I'll try and fast forward through parts of it just so that you don't you know get really really bored and angry at me when it's not my app that I designed this is the app you start off you've got your truck and then this is what you see the majority of the time you can click through a couple of things when you're going to to charge it I've got it like on six times the speed just to give you an idea of how painful it is to use this app you're going through you're clicking things trying to get it to charge trying to get it to work and it is just loading loading loading loading for the majority of the time in this example I'm going through and I'm trying to resume scheduling I'm trying to charge it I'm trying to do everything just to show you but here's the example of this why it drives me nuts [Music] foreign [Music] and now for the second part of my story taking the truck on its first trip its first big road trip I was a little bit nervous because the app already wasn't really working and I knew that we would need to have reliable power to recharge the truck well it turns out that my worst fears were actually accurate they were true we pack up the family we get everything ready we're excited about this ski trip I calculate everything out we should be okay I do have the portable charger so we can do 110 which is still a slow slow charge but it'll just take the edge off so when we do get to the ski hill we're gonna be ready to go we can just part we can just plug it in at the Airbnb and let it charge even if it's just a little bit slow we're gonna be there for three days so might as well as just have that you know going for us so we get most of the way there I'm like you know what let's just take a couple of extra steps tell my wife that let's go ahead and fast charge the thing most of the way up on the way up to the mountain before we actually get there so that way we make sure we have enough power we do that trying to get the charger to work oh my gosh they make it sound so easy you just take the plug and you plug it into the car and the next thing you know you're charging on the blue oval Network well I gotta tell you that's not exactly my experience in fact we had to end up downloading the chargepoint app just to get this thing working so we got it working we got it most of the way charged by the way make sure you know where your chargers are at because there is some pretty uh interesting places I'll say that there's charging stations so take a look around before you go to your car go outside of your car and make sure that the charging station is in a safe place anyway we charge it we go up the mountain I my battery is going down I'm getting range anxiety going to the top of this mountain I end up with 120 miles left on the car battery um and I've got three days so I'm thinking hey no problem I go I find the charger I get an extension cord it's a lower gauge extension cord so I wasn't sure if it was really going to work find out it doesn't after I left it charged all night it didn't charge I plugged in all night it didn't charge at all I couldn't get the app to work and I thought well maybe it's charging but it wasn't so all night long I leave it in there I get up the next morning it now it was super cold and if you're not familiar with the the batteries in the cold well it zaps the battery strength I lose 20 miles overnight I wake up the next day and I'm thinking what in the world am I going to do I got 98 miles left I have to be able to get to the bottom of this hill I gotta make it so we're home otherwise you know what my wife's really not going to be very happy when I've got the kids and I'm on this trip I try to go to one of the super charging stations I'm sorry fast charging stations and they're all packed they're somebody that's been plugged in there all day they just leave their cars it's something that you really have to work on with with electric vehicles so I I find a thicker extension cord when I show you the video of the charger the portable charger I've got the extension cord in there now I get that I plug it in finally oh my gosh a big sigh of relief we end up being able to charge the vehicle part of the app too is that it requires that you have an address of where you're charging I don't know why it does that but it usually takes about 24 hours before the address of wherever you're charging shows up on the app so also don't know how to get it to show up any faster so the next day leave it in overnight I leave it all night long plugged in on the 110 and how many miles do I wake up with well I have another 20 miles on there so after 10 hours we had another 20 miles okay cool we're gonna make it back home and we're gonna make it down that's great I've got 120 miles left on the vehicle we spent all day enjoying our time up at the ski mountain last couple of days at the Airbnb we're on our way back down and you know what when you're actually going downhill it actually has regenerative braking so we ended up with a little bit more power by the bottom of the hill so that was the sigh of relief there but I still needed to find a place to charge so I search around one thing is is the dashboard when you're using the actual interface in the vehicle you can find Chargers but it doesn't tell you if they're already taken or not so then you have to use the app but then the app doesn't work all the time so anyway after going to three different locations I finally found one that worked and the app was working okay so I was able to charge my vehicle at the end of the day what's the number one thing that you need to be able to do when you have an electric truck charge it so that you can drive it uh I definitely think that there's a big opportunity for Ford to figure out like Hey how do we make this seamless for people um one person I'm on a Ford Lightning Owners Group and one person said it really really well they said Tesla makes a great user interface and Ford makes great Vehicles which I really do think that the Ford vehicle the way it drives the utility of it the finishes I tell you what I love all of that and at the end of the day the user interface is horrible the charging makes it really difficult but I am willing to sacrifice all of that not ideally hopefully they fix it but for the utility of having an all-electric truck I'll actually do another video too where I compare the Ford Lightning and the rivian because a good friend of mine actually bought a rivian and you can see the size difference pretty pretty drastic but when you say hey Jed why in the world would you regret it well the reason I would regret it is charging is not really super simple and the app is a real big pain in the rear end I gotta tell you so hopefully for you'll figure that out and then I won't regret owning my Ford Lightning at all in fact a 2023 Ford Lightning great vehicle love the fact that it's all electric um don't worry I like my gas vehicles too but there's something about never having to go to the gas station and being able to just plug it in now I've got a good solar system on my house so I'm already generating my own power makes it kind of nice as long as you're only charging at home so the the charging Network that's going on with Ford definitely is going to need to improve and you know what if you're charging at home it should be okay I'm kind of a little bit tainted because I did have a Tesla the Teslas they have these supercharging stations they're all over the place see Tesla's really smart they went and they did all of that set it all up and then Ford and all of the other people that are starting to or brands that are starting to make these electric vehicles are like well where are we going to charge them and they're kind of left with some of these third-party providers because Tesla got the jump on them well Tesla you could literally go you go to the supercharging station it's super high voltage you're charging in like five minutes and you you leave your car on there for about 30 to 45 minutes they're all in great locations and I mean at least everyone that I went to was in a great location I don't know if they have any in bad locations so just be careful with that but you know what they make it seamless plus their app is not clunky um so yes I am kind of unfairly judging forward because Tesla is pretty awesome but I owned a Tesla Model last for about seven years before I bought this Ford truck and so I really had no range anxiety I thought I knew a lot about all of this but there is a whole new dimension when you're looking at buying a vehicle that doesn't have the network of chargers at least the easy network of chargers and an app that makes it difficult to charge half the time like I said fifty percent of the time it works a hundred percent of the time so if that's okay with you I realize I'm an early adopter um I really wanted one of these trucks because I wanted all electric I wanted a truck so hopefully this is helpful for you you get all the little tips and tricks there's some really cool things about the truck as far as the utility and like the front oh my gosh the frunk it's got a little power cord in there or a power outlet in there and you know lots of room and ice chest built in how cool is that so there's some really cool things I can fit my kids in the back they can't like hardly fight they still fight but um they've got plenty of room to really make it a relaxing nice long drive so for that I want to give for props for the design of the actual vehicle itself and in fact I'm going to rate it so Ford you get a 9 out of 10 for the design of the truck you for the user interface I'm going to give you a 4 out of 10. and for the app I'm going to give you a 2 out of 10. now I'm hoping that those other two things are just software updates and we'll be able to get a 9 out of 10 out of all those so maybe I'm like two or three years too early so for that I'll just go ahead and I'll take my licks and I'll move on but if you ask the question why would I regret it charging and the app why would I love it because it's an awesome truck so in the end when I do it again yes I would it's just a little bit of an a learning curve and I think that you just need to be aware if you're going to make the purchase so hopefully this was helpful and thank you please click like if you actually liked all the information and I'll show you some cool aspects of the truck through this whole video and I'll show you the charger and everything that you can expect if you're thinking about buying one have a great day [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Jetters Garage

Views: 709,205

Keywords: EV, Electric Truck

Id: myTIISQhyvE

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2023