Ford's answers to the NHTSA 6.7 Investigation

durallymax wrote:

Thats their own mistake in many ways. Every other brand of diesel truck gets misused just as much. Fords engine wasn't built to handle the added stress. The way they handled it caused a lot of bad publicity even though yes in the end Ford was right for denying a lot of customers claims.

GM went about it a different way, they never really put up a stink, but also never really had as many issues either. They also have no money so maybe they aren't the smarter ones. What they did on the new LML was install the new "feared" Bosch ECM that does not allow the calibration to be read through the OBDII port. In doing this, they were able to gain legal power against tuners and such because the only legal way for any tuner to be able to tune the truck would be for the truck owner themselves to pull the tune and then alter it, anyone else who would gain access to a tune other than the trucks owner would be committing fraud. They also put a hold on the ECMs for 6 months, and any replacement ECMs require a lot of documenting before being sent out.

The CP4 pump itself is less than $1000 through GM.

The key here is what seems to be incredibly bad engineering practice.

Engineers are taught to think through the consequence of failure. If it is a "high consequence" failure, it needs to be both made unlikely to happen (high safety margins) and when it does, mitigated.

For a bit of perspective, we are not talking about something as severe as airbags going off for no reason at 80mph randomly at a rate of 1 incident per 1,000 units in use annually. That is high priority on anyone's measure.

This is a moderate consequence event (mostly financial, low likelihood of personal injury and 3rd party property damage, and at present, low probability.

However, on a customer satisfaction level --- it is right up there.

Whoever got through to the fuel subsystem designers for Ford, GM, VW, etc. basically sold them a bill of goods,

"it never fails, durability exceed xxxxx million km, ja, ja, you can bomb zee factory or drive over IED und it will still work!"

So no engineering was done for mitigating failure --- namely, detection of metal particles / filtering / proactive shut down.

There is one pressure transducer in the pump --- that is the only system warning not counting the low fuel pressure sensor (if equipped) and the fuel tank empty signal.

Something need to be engineered for proactive shutdown of the engine before harm is done!

Or a stop gap filtering of fuel returned to tank to limit / mitigate damage from $1,000 plus labor to $10,000.


Oh yes, the Bosch "ECM", lol... We can have another thread discussing anti tampering features of the new generation of ECMs.

Whether to do it in software / firmware, or to do it in hardware, how it is done, how tuners are detected, etc.

The people who think tuners can't be detected are the same ones who don't have a clue that when they buy any printer (ANY) except for large newspaper or offset presses, it has built in circuitry to put a microsignature on each page it prints. Or every batch of explosive made in OECD is microtagged....