ON JULY 10, a Ford crew showed up at a Canadian National Railway yard in Montreal with 43 F-150 pickup trucks. They loaded 42 trucks into 10 double-decker rail cars. The 43rd, they left outside. This was a special version of the vehicle that has outsold every other model car, truck, and SUV in America, for 42 straight years. They hitched the special truck—which had neither a V6 nor V8 nor diesel nor even four-cylinder EcoBoost engine under the hood—to the front train car. Then Linda Zhang, chief engineer for all things F-150, hit the throttle. And the all-electric Ford F-150 towed a 1.3-million-pound train.
