For Jeff Zabel, driving a truck has long been a fundamental part of daily life. A sales manager at Dwayne Lane's Skagit Ford, he is quick to explain how practical a pickup is for hauling refrigerators, gravel, or picking up large items without having to borrow a friend’s truck. Working in Skagit County, Washington, where most people are deeply skeptical about electric vehicles, Jeff wasn't looking to buy an EV. He loved his traditional truck.
But his daily 90-mile round-trip commute was taking a significant bite out of his paycheck.
Jeff had recently put a new set of rugged off-road tires on his truck. "They looked amazing," Jeff recalled, but they completely tanked his fuel economy down to a painful 16 MPG. He suddenly found himself filling up practically every other day, watching his monthly fuel bills skyrocket to between $800 and $1,000. But he powered on, hoping that gas prices would eventually come back down.
Jeff’s breaking point arrived unexpectedly after he and his wife took a two-week vacation to Mexico. While they were away, his beloved truck sat parked outside. When they returned and Jeff brought the vehicle into the shop for a standard oil change, the technician noticed a coolant leak. Because it was under warranty, Jeff ran it to a nearby Toyota dealership to get it checked out.
The diagnosis was a shock: rats or mice had nested under the hood during his vacation, causing a staggering $13,000 worth of wiring and coolant line damage.
Even though his insurance company covered the bill, Jeff was sick to his stomach. Being in the automotive industry, he knew that an overhaul of that magnitude meant extensive, complicated repairs. "To be honest, I didn't want the truck anymore," Jeff said.
As fate would have it, the stars aligned perfectly at work. Ford had just introduced a promotional program offering a free home charger installation with an EV purchase. Around the same time, his employer installed EV chargers at the dealership and offered free workplace charging to anyone driving an EV to work.
The wheels began turning in Jeff's mind. He realized he could sell his truck back to the Toyota dealer across the street, buy a Ford Lightning pickup truck, and completely eliminate his massive monthly gas bill. Never having driven an electric truck before, Jeff drove a 2024 Ford F-150 Lightning Lariat home for an overnight test drive, fell in love with it, returned the Toyota, and immediately signed a lease for the Ford.
The math behind the switch turned out to be staggering. At local prices hovering around $5.10 per gallon, a single 90-mile daily round trip in his old pickup cost Jeff roughly $29 in gas, and including weekend road trips, his total monthly gas bills were hovering around $900. By contrast, plugging the Lightning in exclusively at home on Puget Sound Energy's standard residential rate of 12 cents per kWh, that exact same 90-mile commute would cost him just $4.50—saving him over $24 a day. Maintenance costs are also a lot lower, since the Lightning doesn’t require regular oil changes. And because his employer generously offers free power at work, he can easily shift his charging routine to the dealership, so Jeff’s daily commute energy costs have dropped to literally nothing.
There are, of course, a few minor trade-offs. Jeff admits that he occasionally misses the "beefy," aggressive look of his old off-road truck with oversized tires. "It just looked cool," he laughs, admitting that the giant tires did more for his ego than for his daily commute. But any nostalgia for the old look vanishes when he feels the comfort of the Lightning, and remembers that his giant monthly gas bill is gone.
Jeff's experience was so convincing that he managed to convert a fellow truck enthusiast at the office. He successfully talked his colleague Robert Nelson, the parts and service manager who oversees three stores on the Dwayne Lane dealership campus, into making the switch. Robert, who also has a grueling 90-mile daily commute and was watching his Nissan Frontier drain his wallet, now also drives a Lightning.
For a guy who spent his career surrounded by and selling internal combustion trucks, the EV math simply became too sweet for Jeff to ignore. He is living proof that even the most dedicated truck owners can find a better, more comfortable, and cheaper way forward.
