Ford’s decision to sunset the F-150 Lightning comes at a moment few expected. Just as the electric pickup heads toward retirement, its sales momentum surged. During Q3 2025, Lightning deliveries jumped nearly 40%, underscoring that electric trucks can resonate with buyers, even while the gas-powered F-Series continues to dominate America’s full-size truck market.
A lineup of white, blue, and red Ford F-150 Lightnings signals how far Ford’s electric truck has come in a short time. Despite ongoing skepticism around EV pickups, the Lightning closed out its run with its strongest quarter to date.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning is exiting the stage on a high. In the third quarter of 2025, year-over-year sales rose by almost 40%, marking Ford’s strongest quarter yet for an electric truck and putting the Lightning ahead of every other EV pickup on the market.
The timing raised eyebrows. Many observers expected demand to taper off, especially with EV enthusiasm cooling across the industry. Instead, the Lightning defied expectations.
There’s no question the now-expired federal EV incentive influenced buying behavior, as shoppers rushed to lock in the $7,500 credit before it disappeared. Still, the scale of the increase was striking, particularly given that Ford had already confirmed just weeks earlier that the Lightning would be discontinued and replaced by a new extended-range electric model.
The broader F-Series lineup remains Ford’s unshakable foundation. Internal-combustion F-Series trucks once again claimed the title of America’s best-selling full-size pickup, posting 197,727 sales in Q3 alone. That brings total F-Series deliveries for 2025 to an impressive 597,546 units.
Yet within that dominance, the Lightning managed to stand out. Ford delivered 10,005 Lightning trucks during the quarter, a solid jump from the 7,162 units sold over the same period last year.
By contrast, the rest of the electric truck market showed uneven results. Tesla’s Cybertruck slid to roughly 7,100 units, Rivian’s R1T experienced a dramatic 85% drop, and while GM’s Silverado EV and Sierra EV posted strong percentage gains, their overall volumes remained limited. In practical terms, the Lightning emerged as the EV pickup buyers trusted most in 2025.
Despite this late surge, Ford is moving away from a fully electric truck strategy. The company is now focusing on extended-range electric vehicles, or EREVs. These models pair electric motors with an onboard combustion engine that functions solely as a generator, replenishing the battery while driving. In effect, it flips the plug-in hybrid formula on its head.
The rationale is straightforward. EREVs are designed to handle long-distance towing, extended road trips, and unpredictable work schedules without requiring meticulous charging plans
. That directly addresses one of the most persistent criticisms of electric trucks: limited range under heavy load. With overall EV demand softening, Ford appears to be betting that EREVs better reflect how American truck owners actually use their vehicles.
It’s rare for a vehicle to hit its stride just as it’s being phased out, but that’s exactly what happened with the F-150 Lightning. The Q3 spike coincided with expiring incentives and last-call urgency, yet it also demonstrated something more important: there is real demand for electric trucks when capability, familiarity, and ease of ownership align.
The Lightning’s final chapter suggests Ford wasn’t wrong about electric trucks, it may have simply arrived too early for the market’s comfort zone.
If the automaker executes its next-generation EREV trucks correctly, blending electric drive with gas-powered reassurance, it could finally convince even the most traditional truck loyalists to embrace electric assistance without giving up the confidence they expect from a workhorse pickup.
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