2019 Ford F-150 Battery

Ford trucks have never had more demands on them from an electrical perspective and the 2019 Ford F150 is proof of that. Start/stop engines, along with all the modern electrical amenities we've come to expect in modern trucks mean a significantly increased demand on the batteries they use. Just 20 years ago, a 1999 Ford F-150 with a 5.4-liter V8 could use a Group 25 REDTOP battery, that weighs less than 32 pounds. Fast forward 20 years and a 2019 Ford F150 with a 2.7-liter V6 uses a Group H6 YELLOWTOP battery that weighs in at just over 54 pounds!

You might expect a battery brand to immediately talk about cold cranking amps (CCA), but what sense does it make that an engine that is 50% smaller needs a battery that is more than 68% heavier?!? In modern vehicles, it's not about the cold cranking amps (CCA) that battery brands have traditionally liked to hang their hats on. There's plenty of cold cranking amps in these batteries to start little V6 engines, but the bigger concern is about the amount of reserve capacity a battery has and that often has a strong correlation to the weight of the battery. 

A lot of battery companies use to focus their marketing efforts on promoting the cold cranking amps of their batteries, but we think the weight of a battery is the important number to notice for modern vehicles, because not everyone lives in places that get extremely cold and knowing the weight of your battery gives you a good idea of the amount of the amount of active material that is packed into it and the power it can provide.

A battery brand can rate a battery at 700 Cold Cranking Amps and it might deliver that for the first few weeks or months, but it may drop off significantly and/or quickly after that. OPTIMA prefers to conservatively rate our batteries, so a Group 25 REDTOP that is rated at 720 CCAs is likely to test well above that and do so for far longer than a traditional flooded lead-acid battery. Battery companies can do the same thing with reserve capacity ratings, but there's no fudging the numbers on the weight of a battery.

A battery weighs what a battery weighs and you don't need any special test equipment to verify that, a bathroom scale works just fine. Our H6 YELLOWTOP battery weighs in at just over 54 pounds, while you might have a hard time finding an H6 from anyone else that weighs more than 45 or 46 pounds. Nine pounds more in the same box is a lot of power and a lot of active material. 

All OPTIMA Batteries use 99.99% pure virgin lead and the cells in OPTIMA batteries are connected with thick, cast straps, as opposed to cheaper and more restrictive "tombstone" welds found in most other batteries. When you don't cut corners in the components you use to build batteries, you end up packing almost 19% more weight into a battery that occupies the same amount of space. 

Some 2019 Ford F150s require an even larger battery, like the King Ranch edition with a 5.0-liter V8. Those trucks move up to our 60.5-pound H7 YELLOWTOP, but that's not even the largest battery required for some 2019 F-150s. If your F-150 has the 3.0-liter diesel engine, Ford will tell you to buy an H8 battery. While OPTIMA doesn't offer an H8 battery as of this writing, see if you can find an H8 battery from someone else that weighs more than the 60.5-pound OPTIMA H7 battery. If you can find one, buy it. 

If you can't find an H8 battery heavier than the OPTIMA H7 battery and you don't want to pay for a larger battery that doesn't pack as much power as a smaller OPTIMA, pick one up. If you do buy any OPTIMA battery from us and one of our Digital 1200 chargers at the same time, we'll even add a year of free warranty replacement coverage to your battery.