For those individuals who decided to wait on placing their reservation on the Ford F-150 Lightning, there is a chance you might have incurred a price bump between $6,000 and $8,500 compared to the previous year. Unfortunately, while we had all hoped the prices of batteries and battery technology would decrease, it’s actually gone the opposite direction. Ford Motor Company has now revealed that “significant material cost increase and other factors” have caused the price bump.

Before customers awaiting the arrival of their F-150 Lightning panic, Ford has made it clear that this will not impact customers who placed reservations and are awaiting the delivery of their new electric truck. Those customers only need to fear the dealer trying to post-purchase markup on their unit. This bump in price from Ford will hit hardest to a few reservation holders who have not yet ordered the trucks and all newcomers desiring to have a 2023 F-150 Lightning in their garage.

Ford isn’t the only one having to raise prices though. GM raised their base EV pricing up $6,250 and fellow EV competitors Tesla and Rivian have raised pricing significantly higher than both GM and Ford. So why these price hikes? Well, once again the coronavirus is being targeted for the extreme rise in raw material cost for batteries and electric vehicles.

Ford has racked up nearly 200,000 reservations for the F-150 Lightning. In return Ford stepped up production to 150,000 trucks yearly.

While the F-150 Lightning release date was announced in April, 2022, it’s unknown how long customers are waiting for their 2022 model units to arrive or how long until 2023 models begin to leave the factory. However, Ford seems determined to continue to push the EV platform, as CEO Jim Farley has numerous times upped the production ante desiring to have 150,000 Lightnings made yearly. While price hikes and wait times bear bad news, the F-150 Lightning with a standard battery did gain an additional 10 mile range. This brings the standard battery total range to 240 miles of non-towing fun.