Editor’s note: This is the latest instalment in an occasional series called Power Trips, in which we go on a road trip in an electric vehicle to explore the pros and cons surrounding traveling along the ever-expanding EV highway.
Stop and smell the grilled cheese. That’s one of many takeaways I gleaned from a recent Power Trip from my home in North Vancouver to SilverStar Mountain Resort in a Ford F-150 Lightning, an all-electric pickup truck that proved the ideal transportation for a ski getaway in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. Round-trip distance was just over 1,000 kilometres, and conditions for most of the drive were cold but clear, starting in North Van at zero and dropping to a low of minus-14 Celsius on some of the high mountain passes. We had a frunk-ful of gear, two front-seat occupants and a 50-pound dog in the rear seats. The perfect scenario to see what living with an all-electric Ford pickup truck is like, as many skiers and boarders use pickups as their weekend warrior whips.
North Vancouver to SilverStar Mountain
One of the challenges of taking a pickup truck on a winter trip from the Lower Mainland of B.C. to the Okanagan is keeping the gear in the box dry. Yes, a box cover does the trick, but many pickups are not equipped with these. The Lightning wasn’t, but the only gear we had to put in the box were skis in ski bags. Why? All our luggage, ski boots, and cooler fit into the 400-litre (14.1 cu.ft.) frunk. For those summer trips, that converts to two sets of golf clubs and carry-on luggage.
All loaded and sitting in our driveway with 329 kilometres of range showing, I punched our final destination into the Nav system, the Vance Creek Hotel in the heart of SilverStar village. The trip computer quickly calculated a 522-kilometre route, and two charging stops that would require a total time of 55 minutes plugged in topping up electrons. That struck me as optimistic. And, interestingly, the range had dropped to 313 km without turning a wheel. More on that later. Just over two hours into the drive we went off the charging schedule, stopping at Britton Creek rest area on the Coquihalla Highway instead of the prescribed first charging stop in Merritt, which was about 64 kilometres up the road.
We stopped here for three reasons. First, there is a 50-kW BC Hydro charging station at the rest area with two chargers. Second, the rest area is well equipped with heated washrooms and, most importantly, a great trail system to take our dog Sherlock for a good walk. The third reason was it was lunchtime. As my wife took Sherlock for a snowy romp in the woods, I pulled out an electric grille, plugged it into a 120-volt outlet in the Lightning’s box and cooked up some grilled cheese sandwiches. All the while the F-150 Lightning was pulling about 46 kW of charge. Once Sherlock was back in the rear seats and we’d polished off the grilled cheese, we were all set to unplug and hit the road again. This was an 80-minute stop, which according to the trip computer left us with one 30-minute charging stop in West Kelowna to give us enough juice to get to SilverStar with enough left over to get us back into Vernon on the way home for a big charge.
As it would turn out, we wouldn’t need to do that. During the Kelowna stop at a Flo DC fast charger in a shopping centre parking lot, we picked up some groceries and took the dog for a small walk. An hour later we pulled into the Vance Creek Lodge with 64 kilometres of range left, but with three days of skiing ahead of us and no reason to drive the Lightning, we’d deal with that later. The trip computer displayed a driving time of 6 hours and 49 minutes, a total distance of 468 kilometres and an efficiency rating of 35 kWh/100 km.
What is Intelligent Range in the Ford F-150 Lightning?
I’ve often wondered if the growth of electric vehicles we’ve seen in the past 15 years would have occurred had it not been for the ubiquitous satellite-based technology that provides real-time glimpses into such things as traffic congestion, weather conditions and elevation gain, to say nothing of the cloud-based navigation systems modern vehicles come equipped with. Without all this wondrous technology, an electric vehicle’s range would be far from exact, and without the ability to locate nearby charging stations (i.e. the days of paper maps in the glovebox), doing any kind of road trip would be fraught with uncertainty.
The F-150 Lightning comes standard with something called Intelligent Range, and I honestly couldn’t imagine doing this Power Trip without it. Once I set the destination for SilverStar in the navigation system, Intelligent Range calculated range based on past driver behaviour, forecasted weather conditions and even elevation changes to predict how much energy will be used in future driving. The Lightning’s battery system reports how much energy is available at any given time, while the powertrain module tracks how much energy is being used. This is why the range dropped from 329 km to 313 km before we even started the trip. The Intelligent Range system accounted for dropping temperatures and big elevation gains on the trip into the mountains.
Does the Ford F-150 Lightning have battery preconditioning?
Battery preconditioning is also another great technology that the Lightning comes standard with, and one that certainly shaved time off our charging sessions in the sub-zero temperatures we experienced in the mountains. Here’s how it works: when I programmed the round trip to SilverStar into the Nav system, the prescribed route included suggested DC fast-charging stations along the way. When we were just over 30 kilometres from the charging station the vehicle preconditions by warming up the battery, allowing it to accept a charge faster in cold weather, thus getting us back on the road quicker. In hot weather, the system cools the battery pack.
SilverStar Mountain to North Vancouver
As smart as the Lightning’s trip computer is, it’s not foolproof, so a little human AI was in order. Despite all the benefits of the Intelligent Range system, it did not show that there are four public Level 2 chargers in the daytime parking lots of SilverStar Resort. That is why it directed us to have 62 kilometres of range when we arrived, enough to get us back down the road and into Vernon where there are several DC fast chargers. Instead, during one of the early morning dog walks, we drove the Lightning and plugged it into one of the Level 2 chargers, and by the time we retrieved it as darkness fell, we were back up to 81 per cent range, more than enough to get us to the Electrify Canada fast charger in Merritt.
A few hours later we pulled into Merritt to find no vehicles plugged into the four-charger station, meaning we would be able to get an excellent rate of charge. We did, hovering around the 124-kW mark, and by the time we’d walked over to the nearby Tim’s for a bathroom break, did a walkaround with Sherlock, and polished off some great leftover sourdough pizza from Pizza Gratta in SilverStar (I can’t recommend it highly enough!), we had gone from 98 to 346 km of range, or 90%, meaning we could make it back home to North Vancouver without any more charging stops. We arrived home with 86 km of range left, a total drive time of 6 hours, 35 minutes and an efficiency rating of 29 kWh/100 km. That was 6.0 better than the trip up to SilverStar, so you can see how elevation change and cold temperatures affect an EV’s efficiency.
Final thoughts about EV pickups and the Ford F-150 Lightning
I get why many are skeptical — some downright hostile — about swapping out their ICE pickup truck with an all-electric like the Ford F-150 Lightning, the Chevrolet Silverado EV, the Rivian R1T, and I suppose the Tesla Cybertruck. This power trip revealed the pros and cons of heading up into the mountains for a winter play getaway. The pros were the money saved by using electrons rather than carbon. A back-of-the napkin calculation figured about a $100 saving over a gas-powered F-150. Other benefits included the usual EV-over-ICE advantages: smoother, quieter ride, quicker acceleration, extremely stable handling, and zero-emission driving.
The biggest negative is that the trip took longer on the both legs: about two extra hours on the way up and 50 minutes on the homeward-bound trip. But had we stopped at the Electrify Canada DC fast-charger in Merritt on the way up instead of the 50 kW BC Hydro charger at the Britton Creek, that two-hour time difference would be closer to 90 minutes. However, a very real con most frequently cited when people look into replacing their gas-powered vehicle, be it pickup, SUV, hatchback or sedan, is the price disparity between comparable models. The 2024 Ford F-150 Lightning Flash we drove stickered at an MSRP of $86,190 plus $2,795 Freight & PDI. A similarly spec-ed ICE version is approximately $78,240 (Lariat trim) plus same Freight & PDI.
And finally, about those grilled cheese sandwiches. We’ve done many ski trips up to the Okanagan mountains over the years, pretty much annually before our two ski-mad kids moved on, and typically we’d stop once: a 15-minute gas up in Merritt which included a fast Subway lunch. Mentally, I was always just in such a rush to the get to resort. Sort of a twist on the ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’ line. But that stop in Britton Creek was better. Yes, the stop took almost six times as long, but we made some great memories there, from walking the dog in the snow to grilling in the bed of an F-150 Lightning. So yes, an EV road trip does require longer stops to charge than to simply gas up, but if you approach that not as an inconvenience but as an opportunity to get creative and have some fun, arriving a little later is a small price to pay, in my opinion.
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