SoonerLS

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?

I paid $2.46/gal for E10/87 in Sapulpa on Monday evening.

$2.55/gal for E10/87 last night in Tulsa

Make it up in volume.

Hopefully they’ll get it squared away.

I don’t know if it’ll work on your generation of truck, but it’ll take a little while if it does. The problem on the 12th Gen trucks was that the BMS wasn’t allowing the charging system to sufficiently charge the battery (maybe because of short trips, I don’t remember), so it was legitimately turning the system off to save battery. After disconnecting the BMS, it took a few trips for the charging system to get the battery back up to full capacity, and that’s when the truck stopped turning everything off right after killing the ignition. Also, on the 12th Gen trucks, there were sensors on both power leads from the battery. One was the BMS that was safe to unplug, but the other one had to stay connected. I’ve long forgotten what the “other one” was, if I ever knew at all.

It’s not so much an error message as a status notification. Disconnecting the sensor caused the system to stop the “optimized” charging and just go back to charging all the time, which caused the cutoff to stop happening so quickly after killing the ignition. It still happens, but only after 20 minutes or so. I was concerned that it might shorten the battery life, but considering that my truck is coming up on 12 years old and is on its second battery, it would appear that the short cutoff was the only “casualty.”

I haven’t spent much time on hydrostats, but every geared tractor I’ve ever driven has had “cruise control”—it’s called a hand throttle and a governor.

The solution for this on the 12th Gen F-150 was to unplug the Battery Monitoring System sensor on one of the leads to the battery (I think it’s on the negative lead, but it has been a long time since I yanked it). The BMS is supposed to make charging more efficient, but all it seemed to do was cause it to charge insufficiently.

tl;dr: Lawsuit claims that the Mach-E doors are dangerous as designed because there’s no manual/mechanical release.

Yep. We’ve discussed this ad nauseum over the years, but Ford’s stock price will always lag because of their two-tiered stock structure where the Ford family controls the voting stock. That keeps out big investors, like institutional investors, because they can’t buy any control over the company—no matter how much Ford common stock you buy, you don’t get any say in how the company is run. On the minus side it keeps the stock lower in price, but on the plus side it keeps the likes of Carl Icahn and other activist investors away.

E10/87 was $2.51/gal when I filled up on Monday evening. The winter storm that hit later that night sure did wonders for my gas expenditures this week.