Ford F-150 Lightning
Why 7.0: Ford took the shape 45 million Americans already understood, put 131 kWh under the bed, gave it an independent rear suspension no other F-150 has ever had, and made it able to power a house for three days. It is the least ideological electric vehicle ever sold.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Silence in a full-size pickup is genuinely novel — no idle shake at the lights, no V8 boom on the motorway. But Ford replaced it with nothing beyond a soft whirr, so like the Plaid there is simply no engine note here to rate.
electric · rated 0.5 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €68k (2022) → €37k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Two ISOFIX positions on the outer rear seats, the outer pair being the ones the standard covers.
The rear anchors are the supported route — the manual points child seats there, and front-passenger ISOFIX is the exception rather than the rule. A belt-mounted seat up front needs the airbag off, and cars with a rear row don't always fit a deactivation switch, precisely because the rear seats exist.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The Lightning's story is two stories, and they are two years apart. In 2022 Ford took 200,000 reservations, raised the price four times in a year, and watched trucks change hands above sticker while dealers added markups on top — the flipping was real, well documented, and Ford eventually wrote reservation-transfer restrictions to slow it down. By 2024 the same trucks were sitting on lots with five-figure incentives, Ford had cut a production shift, and used values had fallen further and faster than almost any other new vehicle on the American market. What settled out of that is an ownership pattern that scores well without being romantic. Lightnings get used: they are trucks, they do truck things, and the frunk and the 9.6 kW of onboard export power turn out to be the features owners actually talk about. What holds the mileage figure back is range under load — towing roughly halves it, which quietly disqualifies the Lightning from a big share of the work a petrol F-150 does, so a lot of them end up as the household's second vehicle rather than its workhorse. The speculative wave of 2022 is what keeps the flip factor honest. Everything since has been a truck being a truck.