That new Ford F150 is going to cost you

Engineer9860 wrote:
This is something I thought about when the announcement was made that the F-150 was going to aluminum.

There currently isn't any body shops with the infrastructure in place to fix the aluminum bodies. The ones who can make the investment for the equipment to do so will have a leg up on their competition.

And the aluminum F-150 will be more expensive to insure. No doubt. There is no getting around that. It will certainly be more expensive to repair. Once compromised aluminum will have to be replaced. It cannot be worked like steel.

One other thought on aluminum is crack propagation. Aluminum airplane skin, and OTR diesel truck bodies crack just from stress, flex, and every day usage. Will this affect resale?

How long before the meth heads start stealing them just for the scrap aluminum...... Higher to insure because of the threat of theft.

These are all legitimate things to consider.

I'm pretty sure you don't know the material composition that is being used including myself. Having said that I'm not convinced your analogy is correct, including your meth heads is a whopper (I'm more worried about loosing my steel tailgate than my aluminum hood).

On the flexing and cracking topic, some of the '96 F150's developed a very small crack in the driver side door on the lower right hand portion around the window. The reason was because the structure/support design wasn't very good and adding thicker sheet metal and adhesive material on the back side of the affected area would not solve the problem.