An electric truck was put to a towing test and did not do very well according to a YouTuber who tried an experiment with a new 2023 electric truck. The attempt was done by a YouTuber with 1.4 million followers who wanted to tow a 1930 Ford Model A truck with a brand new 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck – an experiment that they said ended in “a complete and total disaster.”
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YouTuber Tyler “Hoovie” Hoover started his experiment by saying: “This is my new 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck.”
The plan Hoover made for this experiment was to simply drive the EV truck only 32 miles away with an empty trailer in tow, and then load up a pickup truck he recently bought, a 1930 Ford Model A, so that he could tow it back the same way he came.
“My plan was to make two trips up today. About 32 miles each way, so that’s about 64 times two: 128 miles round trip,” he said, according to Breitbart.
“I had this thing charged to just over 200 miles when I started my day, so ample margin for error when it comes to range and towing and also considering the fact that the trailer was going up empty two times,” added Hoover.
The EV had already lost three miles of range after he attached the empty aluminum trailer to his truck and “pulling out my neighborhood,” which was just about a quarter of a mile away. After 32 miles away, as Hoover got to his location, the vehicle had lost a staggering 68 miles of range.
He then loaded up the Model A truck and drove it back to his neighborhood, but “got the driving range low warning,” and despite charging the EV for 200 miles at the start of his 64-mile round trip, he saw that he only had 50 miles of range left. Hoover then reacted: “Are you kidding me? That’s almost 90 miles of range in 30 miles. Are you serious? That’s nuts. What a joke.”
“So, yeah, that was abysmally bad, and if the future is electric, there has to be some kind of solution for this. I have no idea why EVs tow so bad. My guess would be it doesn’t have a normal transmission where there’s gears and a car’s in a lower rev range,” he said.
“If a truck towing 3,500 pounds can’t even go 100 miles – that is ridiculously stupid. This truck can’t do normal truck things. You would be stopping every hour to recharge, which would take about 45 minutes a pop, and that is absolutely not practical,” Hoover added.
“The F-150 Lightning is more like a truck that most people use their trucks for, just to get around A to B, and not really using it to do truck things,” he concluded.
“They just want something big and comfortable, and it does great at that, but as far as doing truck things, well so far just with towing, not good,” he finished.
Photo: YouTube screencap
