Oh please. NASCAR for the most part has been cookie cutter since at least 2007. 

I posted this in another thread a while back. A GM exec in AUTOMOTIVE NEWS 10 years ago said that you might not recognize the automotive landscape in ten years, which is now. Do you see that he was right? Mergers, joint ventures, shared components, non-automotive divisions etc. are being realized. Just the costs alone make it necessary if the mfrs. are going to survive. The exec even said there might not be a GM or Ford. Let's hope he's wrong about that! But commonality and homogenous vehicles are more and more prevalent. Government and regulations are causing the demise of uniqueness. NASCAR race cars are cookie cutter vehicles. School buses are just about identical except for the name on the grille. Yeah I get it..safety regs. Same thing with fire apparatus. So far, I can tell an American branded SUV apart from others, but not the foreign branded ones!  But I'm afraid that someday there will be a Government Motors!  Everything will be identical, no brands really. The govt. will design everything. Oh the various plants might be still producing, but they'll be churning out carbon copy vehicles.

"Experience is what you get just after you need it"- Steven Wright.

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.