As expected, this lifted Ford F-150 Lightning loses a solid chunk of range following its modifications.
With the forthcoming onslaught of all-electric vehicles, there are plenty of debates weighing the pros and cons of those vehicles raging across the internet these days. But one thing that a lot of folks aren’t talking about is the fact that it isn’t really possible to hot rod an EV, even though Tesla owners tend to customize their rides at a high rate. Many openly wondered what would happen if you even tried to lift the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning and add big tires underneath, even though FoMoCo was clear from the start that the EV version of the F-150 could utilize many existing accessories for the ICE pickup. Now, we have an answer for that question, because the folks at Town & Country Ford have created the world’s first lifted Ford F-150 Lightning.
We call this a lifted Ford F-150 Lightning because it is, but in all fairness, it isn’t packing some bonkers kit underneath – rather, T&C equipped it with a ReadyLift leveling kit designed for the ICE F-150, which merely lifts the front end two inches and makes room for a set of 34-inch Nitto Ridge Grappler tires wrapped around 20×9-inch Black Rhino Wheels. Regardless, the end result truly looks good, at least in our humble opinion.
No trimming was required to make these wheels and tires fit, nor did T&C have to mess with the truck’s factory crash bars. However, the big question is – how will this level and wheel and tire swap affect the Lightning’s range? Luckily, that very question is also addressed in this video, as it’s taken out for a range test with the climate control set at 72, while the external temp was approaching 100 degrees, which isn’t exactly ideal, but there is a heat wave sweeping the country at the moment.
This particular truck is equipped with the standard range battery and returned 230 miles on a previous highway range test, which is right at the truck’s official EPA estimate. After cruising down the highway for a while, the pickup is taken to a nearby charging station to calculate the results. The lifted Lightning wound up traveling around 196 miles in total, so it lost roughly 34 miles of range with the installation of the leveling kit and bigger wheels and tires, with efficiency dropping from 2.4 miles per kilowatt hour to 2.0.
While one could probably eek out more range in more ideal conditions, this test gives us a good idea of the real world implications of modifying the Ford F-150 Lightning in a way that’s incredibly popular with the ICE version of the pickup. And the results are pretty much exactly what we would have guessed, given how the same mods affect fuel economy of the regular F-150.