Here's how Ford got F-150 Lightning EV pricing so close to the gasoline truck

CHICAGO — The single most shocking thing about the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning when it was revealed was the price. A base Pro starts at just $39,974. The XLT starts at $52,974, and a fully-loaded Platinum at $90,474. What’s so surprising about those prices is how close Ford is flirting with gasoline-engine F-150 price equivalents — and that's before consumers take advantage of federal and state tax incentives. History has consistently shown us that electric cars tend to be more expensive than their gasoline-powered equivalents, but that’s much less the case with the Lightning.

Build out an F-150 XLT to a similar spec as the Lightning — four-wheel drive, Supercrew, EcoBoost V6, big touchscreen — and you’re left with a pickup in the low $50,000 range. That’s spitting distance to the Lightning. A similar thing happens when you perform this same comparison with other trims, too. We’re not calling either the Lightning or the regular F-150 cheap by any means, but the relatively minor price disparity between the two is noteworthy.

The Chicago Auto Show was our first chance at seeing it up close and in-person. While oogling it around the stand, we caught up with Darren Palmer, general manager of Ford’s Battery Electric Vehicles division, to find out how Ford managed its pricing. The answer is largely a simple one — scale — but there are a couple of other choices Ford made to get the Lightning to where it needed to be that we’ll explain later, too.

“But then we work on how we get it for the right price, because I wanted it at a price that is within gas price or nearby,” Palmer says. “Because then the barrier is gone. The psychological barrier in the mind. Once they’ve flipped, they’ve gone for it, they never want to go back. But getting them to flip, because their current truck works pretty well, it’s hard.

“So I knew I had to break that barrier,” Palmer continues. "So the top half of this truck has a scale of 4 million units. That seat, we buy 4 million of. We get the best price in the industry. The front trunk, apart from the unique components, the whole rest of the truck, we get 4 million units.”

The secret to a low price isn’t much of a secret, really. It’s staring you right in the face with the giant F-150 body and interior that is hardly changed from the gasoline F-150 that is the best-selling vehicle in the country today. A massive number of parts used in every other F-150 are also used in the Lightning, giving Ford scale for an electric pickup that they don’t even sell in scale yet. It just makes sense.

“The frame at the bottom is all-new with all-new suspension, but it’s through the same supplier who makes our other frames,” Palmer says. “And they’ve got the facility, so we work with them to produce the all-new frame, but at a reasonable price point, given the fact they build a million frames for us.”

The list of parts sharing goes on, but what about the expensive electric components and battery pack?