I think it would make the waiting much more palatable if Ford would just be transparent with the "why". Tell us upfront, dealer stock will ship before custom orders (not that it makes sense), tell us they need time to fix...transmission, oil pan, engine mounts, whatever! And stop with the "it's at the upfitter" or "awaiting shipment" (awaiting for weeks!). People would understand some last tweaks to get it right, that supplier fell on thier face with CF or beadlocks. What people (especially we loyal Ford owners who had orders in for a truck that wouldn't be available until "late fall" back before Labor Day) is feeling like we are being ****** around and lied to for unknown reasons!
Although it’s good customer service to keep the customer informed, it’s honestly better for both Ford and the dealers to keep their traps shut and it’s better for all of us just like it is them. There is no doubt confidential memos on issues holding up delivery, “employee only” information being discussed within corporate, and I don’t know how much of that could be shared with dealers, if any, but if the corp. is behaving responsibly it’s keeping any known issues very close to the vest with strict “no snitching” instructions. The dealer and customer service types are in a very big bind caught between a paying customer and the people signing their pay checks.
The corporate contacts are wise to not say anything to dealer types so as to not foment rumors.
Let’s hypothesize that Ford said “hey, we had some 10 speed transmissions malfunctioning during certain use conditions, causing degraded performance. We have to pull some units to do further testing, troubleshoot and fix the as yet unknown problem and we can have that done in 4 weeks”.
That would severely impact the F150 reputation, the best selling vehicle in the USA. It would negatively affect the Raptor’s reputation, sale value and resale value, even if it is fixed with haste.
If the problem is only recently discovered and not fully analyzed, any ETA for a fix is blowing smoke. Actually, let’s call it what it is - untrue. In customer service, you don’t write a check with your mouth that someone else’s @$$ has to cash - that is the very job description of Marketing and they don’t like competition.
In all seriousness, there’s a reason the troubleshooters don’t like to estimate a time to resolution on an unknown problem. They don’t know what they don’t know ! There is no accurate way to estimate how much time it will take to fix an unknown problem.
We are on the other side of this as soon to be customers and we’re in the dark. But, if Ford or the dealers were to leak information as to the actual delays, it may actually prove detrimental to the market value of the vehicle. That’s bad for sales, bad for ADM (ok, this is a good thing....) and will be bad for resale down the road.
I do not work for Ford but in the interest of full disclosure, I know 1 Ford dealer mechanic and 1 former Roush employee. That said, while we would all like to know what is causing the delays, it might be better for us if we aren’t privy to the information on ‘how the sausage is made’ so to speak.
It outright sucks to see people who jumped in line early get punked by some seemingly random distribution of units and this seemingly weird allocation system. If they’ve identified a problem and held the units up, that’s good. I’ve seen where carbon fiber and beadlocks are allegedly holding up delivery too. That’s not so cool. Those are certainly vendor supplied pieces and if either the product cannot be supplied or the product was delivered and defective, then Ford should be jumping on those vendors with both corporate feet. Regardless, there is little to do but wait it out.
