These two Ford F-150 Lightning pickups are nothing alike. Their worldviews appear to be diametrically opposed. The original seems antisocial—a flagrant corruption of the noble F-150’s puritanical work ethic, a hedonistic implement for transforming petroleum into muscle car noises and pre-Hellcat, tire-shredding burnouts. Oy, the emissions! The modern Lightning EV, by contrast, hugs the planet by swiftly and silently performing tasks without fouling its immediate environs with even a molecule of CO2 while selflessly offering to power homes, businesses, and disaster locations with its abundant onboard energy. Kumbaya, my truck, kumbaya.
Then again, viewed through a historical lens, they’re eerily similar. Each truck was conceived to pursue a novel trend in the wider light-duty truck market—the high-performance “personal-use” pickup of the 1990s and the e-truck of today. Neither pioneered its segment—the 1993 model having been preceded by the 1990 Chevrolet SS454 (the first muscle truck of
