Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's the wild new Ford F-150 Lightning Switchgear

Ford has a rich recent history of taking sensible electric cars and turning them into freaks with superpowers. Remember the SuperVan 4.0, Mustang Mach-E 1400, Mustang CobraJet 1400 and F-100 Eluminator? All the work of the Ford Performance Demonstrator Program, and this is the latest member of the gang – the F-150 Lightning Switchgear.

Ford calls it an F-150 Lightning heavily modified to “provide a playground for engineers to advance learnings quickly for future electric vehicles". All you need to know is it’s here to prove that EV trucks weighing the same as a small planet can have off-road fun, too.

Built in collaboration with Vaughn Gittin Jr's RTR Vehicles and based on an F-150 Lightning SuperCrew, it gets full carbon-fibre bodywork, wider track width, more suspension travel and better ground clearance thanks to Fox 3-inch internal bypass shocks, and reprofiled front and rear bumpers. There’s also custom independent double wishbone suspension at the front and independent multi-link suspension at the rear with coilovers. If off-road’s your thing, salivation may be occurring.

To ensure it can hit big hard things and keep on trucking, there’s steel rock rails, front skid plates and 37-inch Nitto Ridge Grappler off-road tyres, plus two spares on board… just in case. The powertrain stays bone stock, so there are dual motors for 4WD, 572bhp and 775lb ft of torque and a 131kWh battery.

The truck can, however, be reconfigured for a more road-biased set-up, dropping the front and rear ride heights from 13.5-inches and 11-inches respectively to 7-inches and 5-inches when you’re sticking to the tarmac. The tyres are also swapped out for road-biased Nittos on 20-inch rims.

As you can see from Ford’s supplied pictures they’ve already let Vaughn Gittin Jr very loose in it. The public debut will be at the punishing King of the Hammers race kicking off on 25 Jan in Johnson Valley, California.