Ford has been known to cherry pick the best features of other electric vehicles and make them their own. If a tidbit we’ve found in the Ford App comes to fruition, the F-150 Lightning will soon be able to park itself via remote control using phone apps.
The FordPass Connect app was last updated on January 31 and carries some new images inside that indicate that a remote parking feature is planned for the app.
Some of these images are labeled “freeDrive” but it is uncertain if this is the name of the feature or just the associated imagery for the F-150 Lightning.
The images can be found in numerous places in the app and seem to indicate that a user with their iPhone (and we have to assume that Android users will have the same capabilities) can “drive” their vehicle forward or backward into a parking spot.
It is uncertain whether this functionality will make it to other vehicles. A Ford spokesperson said that they don’t comment on speculation.
It also appears that the function is safeguarded by an iPod-like circular unlock, so you don’t, you know, “pocket drive” your F-150 Lightning into traffic (shown at the top of the lead image).
Ford F-150 FordPass App
iOS developer Steve Moser last year also found some interesting info in the Ford app that users might someday “Use Ford Assistant with Facebook Messenger, or send commands, such as ‘Unlock my vehicle’.” For better (!!) or worse that functionality hasn’t yet come to fruition. So perhaps Ford will never release this parking functionality in the F-150 Lightning either.
Electrek’s take:
Apple co-Founder Steve Jobs once said, “good artists copy, great artists steal,” which he quoted from Picasso, who non-ironically stole that from Stravinsky. The point being, and I’ve said this before, Ford taking the best of what Tesla and others have done is going to make a better experience for its customers. That said, Ford, please stop making those eyesore Tesla Supercharger knockoffs!
The Ford F-150 Lightning is absurdly big and will require some help parking in tight spaces that may have been designed for cars that were being built 10-30 years ago. The problem then becomes, what do the people parked next to the Ford F-150, that squeezed in next to them, do to get into their car? Maybe Ford should also throw a few more layers of paint onto the side of their trucks to prepare for all the ensuing door dings.
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