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This can't last indefinitely. At some point, the contrast between the US-made and Chinese-made cars will become too great to ignore.

We saw that during the 80-s, with the Japanese cars.





Don't Americans like big pickup trucks? Nobody else really drives those in large numbers.

Yes we do. We have nice big wide roads. Heck, my European immigrant friends love trucks more than natives, in my experience. If you have the space for them, there are some very appealing attributes. My Lightning will carry anything I want, tow big trailers, has huge interior space for the family, will outrun most cars (even many 'fast' ones), and is more fuel efficient than a [non-plugin] Prius.

I wouldn't want to own it in a very dense city, but there are only a couple of those in the US. Most US cities even at their densest locations are fine with a half ton.


The Ford Lightning has been discontinued.

The Lightning BEV has been discontinued. The Lightning will continue to be produced, after a delay, but it will only come as an EREV configuration. Ford has been mum on the details but my guess is it will share a large part of the underlying architecture with the pure BEV version. I won't be shocked if Ford backpedals at some point in a couple years and offers both variants simultaneously.

I'm not entirely convinced Ford would have discontinued the BEV if the F150 aluminum manufacturer hadn't caught on fire a few times over the space of a month or so. Ford really needs to go for maximum margin trucks when they cannot produce all that they want, so it made sense to put the Lightning BEV on indefinite hold.


That’s not even the worst part. Imagine owning a car that has $7000 DRM tail light units if you need to replace one?

> $7000 DRM tail light units

What car has that? Please do not spread misinformation.

The Lightning taillights are expensive, a couple grand directly from Ford, primarily because of the integrated blind spot radar. That is the part that needs to be re-paired to the truck if you replace it, the taillights themselves are same as they ever were. Most of the time when someone breaks a taillight they just grab one from eBay and swap over the BLIS because it wasn't damaged.

Also, expensive taillights and headlights are 1) not unique to the Lightning, and 2) not unique to Ford.


My buddy who owns a lightning told me this story first hand. Perhaps he was exaggerating. His taillight got smashed, so this price was for the full unit not just the bulb.

This is a bit of a stereotype. The most popular cars in the US are now SUVs and CUVs, probably because a lot of Americans are well-approximated by spheres.

BYD Dolphin is right on the edge of being a CUV. They can trivially scale it up a bit. It'll be more expensive, but not by much.


And most of those SUVs are the same size that most pickup trucks used to be 10-20 years ago. Even the smallest US vehicles are oversized now.



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