Month: May 2021

Enlarge / If you thought Ford would find it hard to resist reviving the Lightning brand for its electric F-150 pickup, you'd be right. (credit: Ford Motor Company)

As many have predicted, Ford will revive the "Lightning" nameplate for the battery-electric version of its F-150 pickup truck. The formal reveal of the electric F-150 is scheduled to take place in Michigan on May 19, at which point we hope to get more information about this hotly anticipated electric vehicle. For now, Ford is keeping details like the vehicle's range and battery capacity to itself.

Like the Rivian that we just wrote about or the hybrid F-150s that are already on sale, it sounds like the F-150 Lightning will come with on-board AC power outlets. "America's favorite vehicle for nearly half a century is going digital and fully electric. F-150 Lightning can power your home during an outage," said Ford President and CEO Jim Farley in a statement sent to Ars.

The original F-150 Lightning was a product of Ford's Special Vehicle Team. It debuted in 1993 as a high-performance variant of the F-150 pickup, which was offered until 1995. Then in 1999, a second F-150 Lightning arrived, this time based on the 10th-generation F-150.

Enlarge / This Sony engineer can get a PS5, but millions of others can't, thanks to short supplies that are likely to continue.

Sony thinks demand could continue to outstrip supply of the PlayStation 5 into 2022. That's according to a Bloomberg report citing a number of unnamed analysts who listened in on an explanatory call following Sony's recent earnings report.

"I don’t think demand is calming down this year, and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn’t be able to catch up with demand," Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki reportedly said.

Sony has been warning for months that worldwide shortages of semiconductors and other components have made it hard to increase production for the PS5. But this is the most direct sign that those shortages will extend past this year and into the next.

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  Porsche is preparing an all-electric Macan SUV for 2023. Here's an early prototype, seen testing at Weissach in Germany. [credit: Porsche ]

This morning, in an email extolling the flexibility of in silico development, Porsche sent Ars the first official images of its next Macan crossover. And this Macan, which is still a couple of years from being ready, is entirely electric. Unfortunately, the photos don't give too much away about this electric vehicle replacement to one of Porsche's biggest sellers; the prototypes are camouflaged, and that Safari-spec LED roof bar is presumably just there to help Porsche's engineers test around the clock. The four-element LED headlights are probably the real deal, though.

Porsche first revealed that the Macan would go all-electric in early 2019. The car will use a new electric vehicle architecture called PPE (Premium Platform Electric), which Porsche is developing together with corporate sibling Audi. Audi recently briefed us on one of its first PPE-derived EVs, the 2023 Audi A6 e-tron, which uses an 800 V, 100 kWh battery pack and a motor for each axle, with a combined output of 350 kW (469 hp) and 800 Nm (590 lb-ft). Although Porsche isn't ready to share its own specs yet, the A6 e-tron offers a ballpark within which we can guesstimate.

In its email, Porsche says that it has built 20 digital prototypes, with different departments conducting their own simulations. "We regularly collate the data from the various departments and use it to build up a complete, virtual vehicle that is as detailed as possible," said Porsche's Dr. Andreas Huber, who manages the digital prototypes. The aerodynamicists were among the first to start modeling the EV Macan beginning in 2017.