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Even by EV requirements, the Ford F-150 Lightning is pretty feature-packed — it will possibly even energy your home throughout an outage. However since 2020, one obtrusive omission could have irked F-150 house owners who additionally occur to be a fan of Apple’s merchandise. Regardless of the characteristic present for just a few years, Ford’s huge electrical truck doesn’t have Apple Maps’ “EV Routing” characteristic. This may quickly change, and it’s prone to make life a bit simpler for house owners of Ford’s premier electrical truck. The F-150 is the most recent Ford automobile to get the characteristic after the Mustang Mach E acquired it final yr.
On the face of it, EV routing is a straightforward characteristic. It appears to be like at your automotive’s battery stage and provides you some urged charging choices that will help you optimize your journey. However should you dig into it, it’s much more advanced than that. It makes use of issues like the load and different specs of your automobile, your driving model, and the topographic knowledge of the route you may have entered to estimate how lengthy your automobile’s cost will final with a better diploma of accuracy. This complexity could clarify the slower pace of the rollout.
Different options embody the software’s potential to give you real-time charging station availability info, so it gained’t route you to a charger that’s damaged or occupied. It’s going to additionally redirect you to a reachable charging station ought to your battery be too low to hit a charging level in your direct route. EV routing is offered on choose automobiles (just like the F-150 Lightning) and can be set up by means of your automobile producer’s App or Apple Automobile Play.
EV routing helps, however infrastructure remains to be a difficulty
Apple Maps’ EV Routing characteristic is especially helpful because of the current state of long-distance EV travel. Arguably, charging time isn’t the main challenge it was. With a level-3 charger, a whole bunch of miles of vary could be added to a battery in minutes. There’s a cheap argument that you have to be taking a 20-30-minute break each few hundred miles anyway, and the mixture of vary and charging time on higher-end automobiles ties in completely with that.
The principle downside with long-distance EV journey is the variety of chargers and what number of chargers are literally in working order. Of the roughly 147,000 public charging stations working within the U.S., solely 20,000 are “Degree-3.” The remaining are Degree 2 and take considerably longer to cost a automobile. Whereas most of the out there Degree 3 chargers have been strategically positioned alongside the preferred highways and interstates in an try to create “EV Corridors,” a long-distance EV journey nonetheless requires meticulous planning.
EV routing, and related options, take away the necessity for that planning. Add in Ford’s recent deal with Tesla, and the 17,000 or so high-speed charging stations that deal will quickly make out there to F-150 Lightning house owners, and you can argue that EVs are quickly turning into extra sensible. Or sure EVs are, anyway.
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