SoonerLS

FWIW, here’s the NHTSA report on the recall. It looks like a supplier used a sub-contractor who wasn’t up to the task. RCLRPT-25V455-7716.pdf

He was talking about warranty numbers and the VDS, where Ford has improved vs last year. The IQS numbers really aren’t relevant to what he was discussing unless they show up in the warranty numbers, which, apparently, they’re not. If people are bitching to high heaven about having to use a touchscreen to change the temperature or the radio station, that’s something that could be reflected in the IQS but not in the warranty numbers. Likewise with customer complaints about things where they just don’t know how to use a feature or it doesn’t work the way they expect—things that the dealer can head off before it becomes a warranty claim.

Counterintuitively, that might actually be true. Looking at the recalls, many of them are preemptive recalls over issues that Ford found, not issues that customers have reported, and they’re just issuing recalls in case some customer vehicles are affected. F’rinstance, there are 7 open recalls on the 2025 F-150, and for six of them, “Ford is not aware of any warranty claims, field or customer reports associated with [this issue].” (Heck, one is over a missing airbag sticker, which obviously makes the vehicle unsafe to drive.) The seventh was discovered by a service tech in a pre-delivery inspection, so even it didn’t make it to an actual customer. That’s not to say that they’re not bad—the Bronco has a “do not drive” warning on two of its recalls because of improperly installed bolts in the front suspension—but at least they’re catching and fixing most of the issues before they affect customers.

The EPA is reportedly considering just that:

At least that’s more cost-effective than their traditional “launch and abandon” strategy.

The subject of “Made in the USA” has come up a few times, especially with foreign manufacturers building vehicles here and Ford building in Mexico and Canada, so this seems apropos. The tl;dr version is there is no tl;dr version—it’s just…complicated.

FWIW, my dad did once turn in a 25-hour day on his time sheet, and he got paid for it. The company he worked for paid for him to fly to one of their installations (where he’d previously worked) to fix a problem, and he stayed on site until the problem was fixed. The full day that he was up there was the end of DST, which is a 25-hour day, so the company paid him for working a 25-hour day. Having been salaried my entire professional career, I spent more than 24 hours at work a few times, but I never got paid extra for it.

Ford’s 7.0L is the 427…

This happened at three Ford plants in Michigan. So, how do you steal body panels like hoods and bumpers?

$2.50/gal for E10/87 in Tulsa on Wednesday evening.

The reports I heard in the tech press said only that an investment fund where Bezos is the big investor has an investment in Slate. They said it’s just one of many investments, and they thought it unlikely that he even knew about the investment before it blew up in the news, let alone had any say in the operations of the company.

I filled up at the Murphy Oil at the Walmart in Sapulpa for $2.40/gal for E10/87 earlier this evening. I had a feeling gas prices were falling when I saw the QuikTrips were at $2.79 (QT’s gas prices are usually higher than Snoop Dogg on Willie Nelson’s tour bus).

We’re back down to $2.70/gal for E10/87 at the Sam’s in east Tulsa.

I paid $2.75/gal for E10/87 earlier this evening in Tulsa.

You really think that stopping an annual sales volume that doesn’t even amount to two weeks of production at DTP is going to materially affect F-Series sales?