From The Mobilist Inbox This Week

Electric pickups, Kia in NY, road trip

Kia’s coming-out on Times Square last night for the debut of its first purpose-made electric, the EV6. Courtesy: Kia

Each Wednesday, The Mobilist highlights reader articles on Medium, comments, and updates.

‘This sucker’s quick’: Ford, maker of the F-150 pickup, the most popular vehicle of any kind for the last four decades, is finally unveiling an electric version, called the Lightning. My own impression from years of informal conversation with pickup drivers around the U.S. is that the Lightning — like GM’s electric Hummer, the Tesla Cybertruck and Rivian’s R1T — will sell briskly. Yesterday, Ford got much attention for the F-150 when President Biden, promoting his $174 billion plan to build out an American EV and battery industry, stopped by in Dearborn, Michigan, to drive the vehicle. Here’s a short video, from Bloomberg.

That was lots of noise, but Ford and GM continue to be laggards when you consider Volkswagen’s more chin-out approach to the future. The two big American companies largely continue to wait for a demand signal before expanding production capacity, while VW and Tesla are aggressively building out gigafactories now.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan: Even while turning out electric vehicles jury-rigged from its combustion models, Kia, the South Korean carmaker, has been working for four years to produce a purpose-built EV platform. A few hours after…