The F-150 Lightning is finally shipping — is Ford ready?

After almost a year of anticipation, the first Ford F-150 Lightnings are going to customers today. The only full-size electric pickup truck available right now is the company's second EV, which is in a category of one for the moment. Rivian has sold around 2,000 of the well-reviewed R1T but it slots between the compact Toyota Tacoma and full-size trucks like the F-150. Ford plans to take advantage of the fact that the Lightning will have the market to itself for at least a year to steal customers away from their competitors.

We should send every one of them to a customer who's never bought a Ford before.

After he ships out all 200,000 of them. Demand for the Lightning has been so strong that Ford invested $950 million into factory expansion, added 750 jobs, and doubled production, but some customers will still be waiting until 2023 to get their trucks.

When we spoke, the plant had built about 1800 Lightnings, and while Ford would be on plan with its capacity goals, he simply laughed and said no. There isn't enough batteries to build Ford's goal of 150,000 lightnings a year. The battery plant in Georgia Ford operates in partnership with SK Battery is in good shape, and that seems to be the case.

There is a lot of existing manufacturing capacity for the rest, as the Lightning is heavily based on the existing F-150. It's true for chips, which have been in a worldwide shortage since the beginning of the Pandemic. Ford makes around a million F-series trucks a year, which means it buys a lot of chips, and Farley has prioritized making sure the Lightning gets the chips it needs out of that supply. We won't produce 20 percent less Lightnings because we have less chips for the F-series.

Ford will have to stay focused on preorders for six months to a year, but then he wants to aggressively market the Lightning to people shopping for other truck brands. Truck owners are famously loyal, of course, but Farley thinks having an actual EV truck people can buy will entice switchers.

Ford will run out of EV tax credits sometime late this year or early next year, according to Farley. He lobbies for more to help customers transition to EV technology. China has done it. Europe has done it. It is not a Ford thing. If we want to be competitive as a country, if we want to attract EV investments from foreign companies here in the US, if we want to localize the raw material supply chain, we have to have consumer incentives.

Ford's first EV, the Mach-E, has been praised by critics and buyers alike, but the experience of driving a Mach-E is severely hampered by the charging network. It's not really helpful that Ford claims to have the largest charging network if half the charges don't work.

The Lightning will have a charging locator map that will allow users to report broken or malfunctioning charging stations.

Ford's main internal metric for the quality of its charging network is successful charge, which is a measure of how often drivers pull up. It's easy to measure, and doesn't require drivers to report anything. There is a lot of work left to be done.

I would give ourselves a C-plus on a successful charge. We are never going to be done with this, it will be like brushing our teeth.

A major software update later this year will refresh the entire interface displayed on the screens in the car, which will eventually come to the mustang Mach-E. The whole user experience is going to change, according to Farley, who has set ambitious goals for over the air software updates in the future. Field has begun to improve things.

When Doug got here, we had some difficulties with BlueCruise, which was released as a software update for vehicles that had the right hardware. We simplified it down. We are getting a lot of BlueCruise downloads.

The biggest software change of all will come next year when Ford and Google team up to create a new version of their Sync in-car system that will include services from the internet giant. The new version of Sync is running behind schedule according to Ford.

We are making a lot of progress. I am very impressed with the team that has been put in place. Line lock is something we want to do. It will be later in the fall.

Current Ford vehicles will not be upgradable to the new Android-based Sync, which means these first Lightnings off the line will have Ford's existing Sync 4 system.

Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

Ford Blue is a division that makes traditional cars, and Ford Model e is a division that will make electric vehicles. Field and his team have the freedom to invent new vehicles to compete against other companies.

The goal is to allow the Model e team to build new kinds of EV that compete directly with Ford's existing vehicles and let the chips fall where they may. When asked if he was ready to resolve disputes between Ford's traditional car business and his EV division, he laughed.

If we do our job right, I will be worried about that for the rest of my career.