Well, maybe it is more like a static electricity spark than a full-on lightning bolt. . .

By Gary S. Vasilash

A recent piece in Bloomberg about the Ford F-150 Lightning is about how the vehicle has become increasingly popular on the used market. It wasn’t popular on the new market.

Edmunds currently lists four new 2025 models of the electric truck with MSRPs ranging from $65,940 for an XLT to $87,590 for a Platinum.

The Bloomberg piece quotes Jimmy Douglas, CEO of Plug, which wholesales EVs: “When Ford was selling it brand new, the math was complicated. But used, the Lightning is 50% to 60% of the sticker price and that is really a sweet spot; it’s an incredible truck for the money.”

Pretty much everything that is 50% to 60% below sticker is probably popular, too.

From 2022 to 2025 Ford produced some 100,600 Lightnings.

In May 2021 Ford started taking reservations for the truck. In the first 12 hours there were 20,000 people who made a $100 (refundable) reservation.

By December 2021, when there were nearly 200,000 reservations, Ford wisely decided to stop building the list. As it turned out in 2022 there were 15,617 Lightnings delivered, so if all of those 20,000 reservation holders for the first 12 hours hung on to those reservations, there would have been some people still waiting until 2023.

While it is interesting that people are buying used Lightnings, the numbers should evoke not much more than a shrug.

According to the Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index for Q3 2026:

“Used retail EV sales totaled approximately 124,000 units in the third quarter, the highest level on record, up 11.4% year over year, but still only about 2.8% of all used retail sales.”

Which means 97.2% of the vehicle sales in the third quarter weren’t EVs.