by Jim Clayborn
In yet another setback to the troubled electric car line it has devoted 100% of its future plans to, Ford has been forced to suspend production of its signature F-150 Electric line after a battery fire.
The AP reported:
Ford Motor Co. has suspended production and halted shipments of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup after a battery caught fire during a pre-delivery quality check.
Production at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, has been stopped until at least the end of next week.
The automaker said in a statement Wednesday night it has no reason to believe electric pickups already in use by customers are affected by the battery issue.
“By the end of next week, we expect to conclude our investigation and apply what we learn to the truck’s battery production processes,” Ford spokeswoman Emma Bergg said in the statement. “This could take a few weeks.”
The fire happened at an outdoor lot nearby in Dearborn where vehicles are held for quality checks. The truck with the battery problem and two nearby vehicles were damaged by the fire, Bergg said. No injuries were reported.
Even if the batteries didn’t catch fire, their range and performance were hardly setting the world on fire.
As I reported last November, auto critic Henry Payne said the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck’s “kryptonite” is a road trip, after the electric truck with a listed range of 320 miles got him “only 170 miles of range” on a trip up interstate 75 in Michigan, while its gasoline-powered counterpart gets drivers “600 miles and 22 mpg.”
Payne described a stressful experience of the F-150 Lightning’s onboard computer constantly downgrading its own range during the trip, re-routing him to a charging station so he wouldn’t be stranded, and then having no working or availabe chargers to accomodate him.
“I arrived in Charlevoix after 6 hours, 40 minutes for what’s normally a stop-free, under-4-hour trip by gas-fired pickup,” he concluded. The odyssey led Payne to label the road trip as the electric truck’s “kryptonite.”
I’ve got the turbo-6 cylinder. I’m getting 600 miles and 22 mpg — I don’t think I’ll ever get one of those electrics
Another F-150 Lightning owner was even less fortunate, having his brand new model get fried on him during only his third trip.
Far from home, Eric had to spend the rest of the day arranging for the truck to be towed to a technician that could handle it – and even they couldn’t diagnose it without ordering a “special battery” to simply turn it on to read error codes! More days delay…
Eric was lucky it was under warranty, if not, and the batter had to be replaced, Ford truck batteries can run over $35,000.
Perhaps it is stories like this that convinced Toyota Motors to refuse to commit to only electric vehicles – for which they have been relentlessly attacked by infantile environmental activists:
Perhaps Ford should re-consider its extreme, 100% electric future, before it is too late.
