Or having the 6.8 allowed them to raise prices on the 7.3, but most are buying the 7.3 anyway so keep the higher price on the 7.3 and ditch the 6.8.  And the other use cases were probably cancelled.

They are watching more closely and finding problems a lot earlier, but that's not the problem.  Not everything shows up on inspection like not properly heat treating valves.  They need to put the engineers in charge of procurement instead of the finance team and start paying a little more for better quality.

When did they move it out of San Antonio?

Rumor is they are bringing the Tacoma back stateside. They currently have two plants building them in Mexico. This could open space down there for their entry level truck. 

None of this would be an issue if Ford just did its job properly and watched suppliers more closely. How many years has Ford been at this and they still can’t get it right….    

Sounds like the only solution is for suppliers to push back and if necessary walk away before Ford gets the message.   I hope more vertical integration eliminates a lot of these issues.

Kind of like the 5.4 and 6.8 v10 back in the day, they got the same mpg in the real world, the 5.4 was just so much slower. 

Yea, correct on all counts. Everything you described was the case when I worked at the former Indianapolis Steering Systems plant - both when it was operated by Ford and when it became part of Visteon. And we had TVMs back then.   Plante Moran’s WRI last year found that Ford was the only OEM among the six they studied to worsen every year since 2020. The 2026 survey results come out soon. It will be interesting to see if Ford finally improved relations with suppliers or not.        

The error codes and needing to be jump started makes me believe this is the deep sleep battery issue. Having to be on a battery tender or jump started is very common with these mavericks if the battery goes to shit.    That being said, this issue is usually resolved with switching to a higher quality battery like it was for me. As for the error codes, I've heard it's pretty common for the car to pop up false error codes in these modern cars after they've been jump started and/or had a new battery swapped it. It's basically like the car going "What's going on?! Oh nevermind I'm fine". 

Fixed,  but seems nobody is interested.