I don’t think that’s strictly true - and I’ll defer to
@FordTechOne on the finer points, but basically Roush provides a part warranty, similar to the way Ford warranties parts on it’s vehicles - so the Roush branded exhaust, air kit, etc. have their own warranties. In addition, Roush offers performance tunes that 1) may necessarily void the Ford factory powertrain warranty 2) can be optionally covered by the Roush powertrain warranty for 3 years / 36k miles - detailed in the 2 long running Roush threads in the Gen2 forums.
I do not have the Roush tune or parts, however a few users advised they do have the tune, installed by an authorized Ford dealer, which gets them the 3/36 Roush powertrain coverage.
I don’t know if Ford ever offered full powertrain coverage an a Roush vehicle or if it was supplementally covered. From my reading and understanding -
You have a truck with a Roush tune installed by a certified dealer. You subsequently encounter a powertrain problem - let’s say you lunch the transfer case. Tech sees computer has been tuned, reports it up the chain, Ford then -can- deny warranty coverage if the failure is deemed caused by the mod. There is some great confusion as to whether some makers - Whipple, Roush, and a couple others floating around get more leeway in whether they deny coverage. Either way, if Ford denies coverage you can seek coverage under Roush’s optional powertrain coverage. This is not anywhere near the same as Ford’s powertrain or ESP coverage. Roush has a financial cap on repairs and stricter limitations.
I’m not aware of whether or not this degenerates into “he said / she said” or “vendor blaming” where 2 of your vendors keep blaming each other rather than actually fixing the problem.
Posts on here seem to indicate that Ford takes a dim view of perch collars - >1 report of a transfer case failure being blamed on the suspension geometry change and denied, relocated radiators and accompanying tunes, etc.
Gearheads the world over struggle with this dilemma. A lot of it depends on the stealership service staff. It can run from honest brokers who really look hard at whether a mod had anything to do with the failure to the binary denial of coverage because there was a single aftermarket part, anywhere. I’ve been the recipient of stealership goodwill more than once. I’ve had them tell me ‘take it home, remove xxxx and bring it back’. <-- this is clueful, and has meaning they don’t want to say out loud. I did it, and made sure to let the staff know my appreciation. I’ve had techs agree to preview things off the books, and had them acknowledge mods, but agree no way it had anything to do with the repair. And I’ve had techs tell me outright - no way I can get warranty coverage on repairs. Most of the latter was deserved - really obvious, significant mods, but not always.
