Photo: Peter Vardy
The Ford F-Series is the most popular family of pickup trucks in the U.S. That’s not some recent development, but a reality for the past half a century or so, with the pickups in this breed breaking sales record after sales record and setting the pace for a segment that nowhere else is as lucrative as in America.
The success of the F-Series has to do with the trucks being built tough (in the literal sense, not the spin Ford’s PR department tries to give this phrase), packing large engines for rough jobs, and being overall as reliable as one would hope.
While still trying to keep true to the above three traits, Ford is forced by circumstance to begin shifting from internal combustion engines with the power of hundreds of horses to batteries and electric motors. That will not cut power in any way, but it’ll still probably be a challenge to sell an electric half-ton to the people using these things for farms and another kind of hard work.
Yet as of 2021, Americans have something called the F-150 Lightning on their hands. It’s still your regular F-150 design-wise, with some minor changes, but instead of V6s and V8s it uses, as said, motors and batteries.
Now, the thing is as capable as any other of its kind, offering a range of 320 miles (515 km), an acceleration time of under four seconds, and the promise it can carry a 1,952 pounds (885 kg) payload and tow up to 10,000 pounds (4,500 km) of cargo, or livestock, or whatever.
Now, all that sounds great even for a diehard rancher like John Dutton, but what good will it do in the not-so-distant future, when climate change brings upon the world bad weather the likes of which we can only imagine?
Well, that’s a question that popped into the heads of a crew called Peter Vardy. That would be a Scottish business in the market of selling cars by day and dreaming up futures by night. So they’ve come up with a list of the most popular vehicles in the U.S. and the UK, virtually modified to tackle various aspects of the climate change we’re experiencing.
After going through the smog-proof Tesla Model 3 and amphibious MINI a while back, it’s now time to have a look at how the Scots imagine the F-150 from 27 years in the future. That would be in 2050, by which time we should know if the efforts we now make to change our ways have succeeded or not. Vardy imagines it was all in vain, and this is how we get the hurricane-proof truck, rendered based on the regular F-150 Lightning.
The truck’s body remains the stock one, but this one was virtually gifted with all sorts of protections and guards to shield its underpinnings, a mesh over the windshield to keep them from breaking in case something hits, and even a plow up front to help it clear the roads from snow or debris.
The truck would naturally have to ride on large wheels ( the exact size imagined for this rendering was not disclosed) as to not get stuck, and the interior will have to be adapted for these conditions as well, although in this case, you’re free to imagine what you will.
Looking a bit like some of the vehicles tornado chasers use for their daily activities, the so-called STRM C4R, as this F-150 is named (check the license plate, probably should have read Strm Trck) is something none of us really want to become a reality.
While still trying to keep true to the above three traits, Ford is forced by circumstance to begin shifting from internal combustion engines with the power of hundreds of horses to batteries and electric motors. That will not cut power in any way, but it’ll still probably be a challenge to sell an electric half-ton to the people using these things for farms and another kind of hard work.
Yet as of 2021, Americans have something called the F-150 Lightning on their hands. It’s still your regular F-150 design-wise, with some minor changes, but instead of V6s and V8s it uses, as said, motors and batteries.
Now, the thing is as capable as any other of its kind, offering a range of 320 miles (515 km), an acceleration time of under four seconds, and the promise it can carry a 1,952 pounds (885 kg) payload and tow up to 10,000 pounds (4,500 km) of cargo, or livestock, or whatever.
Now, all that sounds great even for a diehard rancher like John Dutton, but what good will it do in the not-so-distant future, when climate change brings upon the world bad weather the likes of which we can only imagine?
Well, that’s a question that popped into the heads of a crew called Peter Vardy. That would be a Scottish business in the market of selling cars by day and dreaming up futures by night. So they’ve come up with a list of the most popular vehicles in the U.S. and the UK, virtually modified to tackle various aspects of the climate change we’re experiencing.
After going through the smog-proof Tesla Model 3 and amphibious MINI a while back, it’s now time to have a look at how the Scots imagine the F-150 from 27 years in the future. That would be in 2050, by which time we should know if the efforts we now make to change our ways have succeeded or not. Vardy imagines it was all in vain, and this is how we get the hurricane-proof truck, rendered based on the regular F-150 Lightning.
The truck’s body remains the stock one, but this one was virtually gifted with all sorts of protections and guards to shield its underpinnings, a mesh over the windshield to keep them from breaking in case something hits, and even a plow up front to help it clear the roads from snow or debris.
The truck would naturally have to ride on large wheels ( the exact size imagined for this rendering was not disclosed) as to not get stuck, and the interior will have to be adapted for these conditions as well, although in this case, you’re free to imagine what you will.
Looking a bit like some of the vehicles tornado chasers use for their daily activities, the so-called STRM C4R, as this F-150 is named (check the license plate, probably should have read Strm Trck) is something none of us really want to become a reality.
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