After natural disasters, electric vehicles come to the rescue

A Ford F-150 Lightning electric vehicle. While Ford has made two-way charging and the ability to power a home “if need be” a routine selling point in TV ads for the Lightning, evidence suggests that most EV buyers are like the Fergusons: Disaster preparedness hardly factors in their thinking. — Bloomberg

The morning after Hurricane Ian knocked out power at Westley and Sarah Ferguson’s home in Haines City, Florida, a suburb southwest of Orlando, Westley ran two extension cords into their house from the outlets on the couple’s Ford F-150 Lightning. He plugged the refrigerator into one and a power strip into the second, which was soon powering lamps, fans and a television.

The Fergusons’ setup was more rudimentary than the Lightning’s design allows – Ford’s top-of-the-line in-home charger will automatically start powering an entire house if the truck is plugged in during a blackout – but it was good enough for them to cook beef stew on an electric stovetop and, afterwards, to host another neighbourhood couple for an impromptu movie night. Cell and Internet service were also down, so they used a Blu-ray player to watch Casper and a turntable to spin big band jazz records.