Electric trucks chipping away at rural America's truck culture

 Don't miss Elizabeth Remberg's piece for Nebraska Public Media, picked up by NPR today.  The headline is "Will Electric Pickup Trucks Get Rural America to Switch from Gas to Electric?"    

Remberg reports mostly from the Midwest, and she challenges conventional wisdom that rural folks aren't really interested in electric vehicles. She does so by going to the heart of the matter:  farmers and their love affairs and close associations with their pick up trucks.  

Here's the lede: 

The electric Ford F-150 Lightning rolls off the assembly line this spring. But will rural Americans, who make up an important demographic for the company and the future of EVs, make the switch?

And here's the salient excerpt: 

REMBERT: Brad Brodine farms in Nebraska and says technology has been good for agriculture. After all, he's now using huge, sophisticated tractors and harvesters after growing up watching his dad plow behind a horse.

BRAD BRODINE: Farmers kind of sit back, and we want to make sure things are going to work because everything's expensive. We don't mind trying new things. You know, if we think it's going to work, we're pretty excited about it because innovation has been a good thing in agriculture.

REMBERT: John Murphy follows the auto industry for Bank of America and says rural drivers are key to EVs catching on. He says all of the electric truck options could bring a transformation to rural America.

JOHN MURPHY: Electric pickups may drive the real tipping point for electric vehicles, meaning your mainstream Midwestern truck buyer may join the forces of the Teslas on the coast to really start tipping the scale.

REMBERT: Wanda Young is a chief marketing officer at Ford. She says the automaker knew it needed to get the Lightning right for old-school drivers who identify so strongly with their trucks.

WANDA YOUNG: You cannot separate a farmer from their truck. You know, it's just like their favorite pair of jeans. We get to see so many of our customers who are coming in, and they're from all different kinds of vocations, from plumbers to landscapers to electricians. And they are talking about how to make this transition to electric.

You'll find prior posts about electric vehicles in rural America here (don't miss embedded links to prior posts) and here.