F-150 Lightning Is A Model T Moment For Our Company. Here’s Why.

My grandfather didn’t come from much. He started out working as an hourly employee at the Ford Highland Park plant in 1918 – employee #389. His job at Ford gave my family a chance to get an education and move up in the world. To think I’d one day get to lead the company he worked at – it’s humbling to say the least. The other day I got the chance to see his working papers and hold his badge at a facility that was just a few miles down the road from the same dirt where he worked, at the first plant in history to put a car together on an assembly line. 

I’ve been thinking about him a lot this week as we’ve prepared to launch the F-150 Lightning. Those early models my grandfather worked on put the world on wheels. The Model T changed the world not because it was beautiful or slick, but because it was ingenious. Our customers found ways of using the Model T for all sorts of things that no one predicted at the time like school buses and ambulances. Some enterprising folks took off the back to make the world’s first pickup trucks.

With the F-150 Lightning, I believe Ford is tapping into the same spirit of innovation that fueled the early models my grandfather worked on.

We’re electrifying America’s most popular truck for 45 years. The F-150 is the second highest selling product in the world. Only the iPhone has more customers. The easy thing would’ve been to leave everything be, but that’s not in Ford’s DNA. Whenever the world needed Ford, we met the moment with ingenuity and ambition: the Model T for a country ready to get moving, B-24 Liberators when we went to war, ventilators when the pandemic reached our shores.

Right now, the world needs zero-emission vehicles. It needs us to bring them to the many, not the few. That’s why we built this truck. It’s not a curiosity, it’s a truck people can use, with instant torque and acceleration, 320 miles of range on a single charge, and a ride so smooth you won’t believe it’s actually a truck. Electrifying the F-150 allows us to give customers features they’ve never seen in a truck before. It can power homes, worksites, campsites, other electric vehicles, and a thousand things we haven’t even thought of yet. That’s what excites me – thinking about what our customers can do with this vehicle. 

There’s a lot of pressure that comes with the decision to change an icon like the F-150 and a lot of skepticism about whether Ford, or the industrial Midwest, can be a center of innovation again. We’re ready to show our customers what this truck can do out in the real world. We’re ready to prove that this digital truck will get better over time, evolving overnight with software updates like a smartphone. We’re ready to show everyone that Ford is rediscovering its roots in innovation.

As Bill Ford said today, “This moment is every bit as important to the company as when the Model T first started rolling off the assembly line.” He’s exactly right. We’re tapping into what made Ford the company that put the world on wheels, and I’m proud to think about what my grandfather might say if he were here to see this moment.