Updating America…
“Did y’all see the pin-up girl has arrived?”
The news is delivered by one of the show’s organisers – male, late 40s, looking far more excited than he should. “We’ve got to get her into your truck!” Quite a lot to unpack here. I can only assume he means photograph this upstanding member of the military in and around our car, rather than bundling her into the frunk, but nothing’s certain. And then there’s the phrase ‘pin-up girl’, surely that died sometime in the late Sixties? This is a story about whether a country is willing to call time on its love affair with oil and embrace a cleaner future. Is America ready to change? On this evidence… er, not really.
Texas is truck country. One in five Ford F-Series pickups sold, is sold here, and Ford sells a lot – close to a million in a good year. Texas is also BBQ country, oil country and according to the supersized billboards lining the I-35 emblazoned with a Tango-faced ex-president, Trump country. If the new electric F-150 Lightning can make it here, it can make it anywhere, which is why we’ve seized a three-tonne truck for two days to answer a few pressing questions: is America really ready to go electric? Is the Lightning simply a better, more useful truck than its combustion-engined relatives? Is this, as Ford claims, the most important model launch since the Model T? And how much beef can one man eat before his colon taps out?
Our story starts in Austin where I scoop up photographer Greg and videographer Charlie. As an Aussie who used to live in the UK, but is now a Texas resident, Greg shall be our cultural attaché. As someone with an obsession about keeping all meat products on ice, and a recently recovered sugar addict, Charlie shall be our food standards offcer and
