Ford Ranger Lightning imagined

A well-known YouTube designer has made the Ford Ranger Lightning a (virtual) reality this week, with these renderings revealing what an electrified version of the all-new 2022 Ford Ranger might look like.

Just days after Ford’s global reveal of the overhauled Ranger, SRK Designs has gone to work on reimaging the new Ford Ranger in EV guise.

Not surprisingly, the result bears a close resemblance to the larger Ford F-150 Lightning pick-up, which as of a week ago had reportedly already attracted about 160,000 reservations in the US – excluding fleet orders.

The Ranger Lightning render features a lower ride height, smoothed-out nose, redesigned grille, altered wheel design, requisite Lightning badging and, of course, a front charging port.

Otherwise, it borrows the basic shape and design of the 2022 Ford Ranger dual-cab, which itself already looks a lot like a shrunken F-150 with its with more muscular design punctuated by C-shaped headlights.

Speculation about a Ranger EV comes amid rampant hype around the larger Ford F-150 Lightning in its domestic market.

Ford has announced it will offer the F-150 Lightning with two beefy EV powertrains, offering 318kW of power at base level and 420Nm in top-shelf guise.

Both produce a buxom 1051Nm of torque, which provides for plenty of performance including a 0-60mph (0-97km/h) acceleration time of just five seconds for the base model, dropping to a blistering 4.4sec for the flagship.

That’s not quite as quick as the world’s first full-size electric pick-up, the Rivian R1T, but the Lightning can also cover 370km between charges, carry up to 910kg in the rear bed and tow up to 4500kg.

Don’t be fooled into thinking the Ranger Lightning is a mere pipedream, however. In June, Ford revealed plans for a second pure-electric pick-up truck to sit beneath the Ford F-150 Lightning.

Tweeting a picture in response to a question about whether there would be a battery-powered version of the new car-based Ford Maverick dual-cab, the Blue Oval brand's North American PR boss, Mike Levine, showed the outline of what is a clearly a sub-F-150 ute that will feature battery power.

No other details were given, but the outline of the pick-up sparked rumours that it came from an official Ford presentation of future models including a pure-electric version of a Ford Ranger-sized ute.

Ford is so far keeping quiet about electrification plans for the new Ranger, only confirming 2.0-litre turbo-diesel and 3.0-litre V6 turbo-diesel engines for the Aussie market.

The new Ranger Raptor is expected to be powered by a twin-turbo petrol V6, but we expect to learn more when it’s revealed in February.

As electrification continues to sweep the industry in response to ever-tightening emissions regulations and buyer demands, some reports insist Ford will release a traditional parallel hybrid powertrain in the new Ranger within the next few years, followed by a plug-in hybrid powertrain (PHEV) with a useful EV range and then a full-electric version that could also adopt the Lightning name.

But it remains unclear whether either hybrid Ranger powertrain will be diesel-electric, which would be unique in its class, or petrol-electric. The big US market would obviously prefer the latter and Toyota is expected to adapt a 3.5-litre petrol V6-based hybrid powertrain to its next HiLux due around 2024.

However, Ford executives have confirmed the 2022 Ford Ranger and its third-generation T6 ladder platform were designed with “future propulsion technologies” in mind.

Ford Ranger platform chief engineer Ian Foston said there were plenty of possibilities “within the platform bandwidth” and that the new-gen Ranger had been future-proofed, but he stopped short of confirming any specifics.

“Nothing to talk about today in terms of what we are doing, but there is something that we’ll talk about at a future date,” he said when the new Ranger was launched last week.

When asked what the mountain of customer research had told the development team in terms of electrification, Foston said there were “two big drivers for electrification” globally, those being customers and government legislation.

“They’re [customers] asking about when will pick-ups be available with that technology … clearly there’s a big future for EVs in every segment, trucks being one of them,” he said.

At the very least then it looks like a hybrid Ford Ranger will emerge within the coming years with the likelihood upped even more by the very real possibility of a hybrid Ranger Raptor.

The timing could hardly be better either given Toyota’s August announcement that the HiLux (and 300 Series LandCruiser) would be hybridised by the end of the decade at the latest.

Ford and Toyota have been waging a diesel pick-up war for years now on both the spec sheets and sales charts, but it would seem a fresh, more eco-friendly battle is looming.