As a company, you know you’ve hit the product-design jackpot when customers flood the internet with countless selfies showing off a feature in ways you might have never expected. This is the case with the Ford F-150 Lightning’s “frunk”—the front trunk space in the electric version of America’s most popular pickup truck. Since the truck’s launch in April 2022, the frunk—which Ford has even dubbed, the “mega power frunk”—has taken on a life of its own. Delighted customers write posts extolling the virtues of the frunk in Lightning owners message boards. On Twitter, owners gush about how it is so useful and flexible that it actually makes them happy.
“The design team focused really hard on making the frunk an extremely functional and flexible space,” says Vincent Mahe, a product design engineer for the Lightning, via email. “So it’s a great payoff to see how customers keep coming up with their own new ways to utilize it.”
Indeed, the Ford design team has plenty of reasons to be satisfied with its frunk approach. While only 1/3 of EV models in the U.S. have a frunk, Ford has fully embraced this feature on its Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning. The latter, however, has truly put the concept on overdrive.
Frunks as a concept aren’t new: Porsche cars have had them forever, since the German company puts the engines in the back trunk. And on EVs, frunks have been around for more than a decade. But Ford conceptualized the Lightning’s frunk differently. Of course, it was going to be big. And with 14.1 cubic feet of space, and a 400-pound weight limit, it’s the largest frunk of any car in America today, according to Ford.
All that space has been a sales magnet for the F-150, which, to date, is the U.S.’s best-selling electric pickup truck. And last month, MotorTrend named the Ford F-150 Lightning the 2023 Truck of the Year, calling it “the first EV pickup to appeal directly to the existing truck market.”
According to Ford, the frunk design process began in August 2018 when the company realized it would have a giant cavity available after getting rid of the internal combustion engine. To start, the user experience and design teams used scissors and hot glue to make a simple cardboard model that they could bring to “every meeting to help customers visualize the opportunity” that the frunk was going to bring them. It was in those meetings where size and accessibility became the number one feature for the team. They learned that people really wanted a big space in the front—one that could easily store just about anything imaginable.
The decision was made to use all the space left behind by the now-obsolete engine, but keep it flatter, making it comfortably accessible while keeping it spacious. In total, the mega power frunk is “wide enough to fit two full sets of golf clubs or eight 50-pound bags of concrete,” according to Ford. This large but shallow shape also makes it ideal for storing and accessing your grocery bags without breaking your back, loading it with dead ducks (if that’s your thing), or just lying down in it and mellowing out at the beach.
Inside, the frunk is loaded with cargo nets, hooks, and D-rings all around its walls in order to secure your cargo, with any trinket and tool neatly stored and accessible. It’s also fully rubberized and has a drain hole for easy hosing down. As Linda Zhang, the F-150 Lightning chief program engineer, says, it’s “one of those features that reshape what vehicles can provide for customers.”
Customer delight
Which brings us to the other huge request: electric power. The Lightning’s frunk has four regular 120 volts in the front, along with USB-A and USB-C ports. As it turned out, this has been a winning design-tech feature. As Mahe told me: “We’ve seen customers who have used it as a platform to run a projector in the middle of a field for movie night; another customer used it for the ultimate BBQ buffet line at a tailgate, and some customers we’ve seen are starting to build custom organizers to store power tools while they charge.”
For the Lightning’s first Halloween in the market, the frunk has been used to set up trick-or-treat stations, complete with lights and smoke machines. Another novel use noted: a flat screen was set inside and plugged in for a virtual fireplace because, well, (shrug emoji).
But the use that surprised Mahe the most is one I brought to his attention: a diaper-changing station for new parents, recently reported in the Detroit Free Press. Emily Jaehnert, of Washington State, told me via chat that when she and her husband, Mac, saw the truck’s frunk, they instantly thought it would be a perfect place to change their baby daughter MacKenzie’s diapers. The size and shape was ideal to do it comfortably and securely. Meanwhile, the standard power outlets allowed them to keep a powered cooler plugged to have “baby bottles and cold beverages ready throughout the drive,” in addition to keeping their electronics stored and connected, ready to go whenever they needed them.
The two of them waxed on about the beauty of the frunk and why they find it so special. The couple also has a Ford Mustang Mach-E, and they can see a clear difference in flexibility and functionality between the two. “Other EV frunks we’ve used have been much smaller, lower, and lacked power,” Mac says. “Until we took delivery, we never realized how much use we’d get out of the four power outlets up front.”
Honestly, as a father who had to endure the nightmare of changing a baby one too many times on long road trips, I wish to have another baby just to buy an F-150 Lightning and enjoy this amazing feature. Of course, a baby isn’t required to make proper use of this frunk. The use cases for the feature seem endless, and all of them have happened without much official promotion from Ford itself. In the end, the fact that even the Lightning design team is surprised by the explosion of customers’ creativity is the best testimony to the impressiveness of the mega power frunk’s design.
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