As opposed to your grandpa’s truck, a brand-new model isn’t as easy or as cheap to repair when it goes wrong. From a fender bender to a transmission flush and pretty much everything in between, a 2021 Ford F-150 PowerBoost V6 hybrid will be certainly harder and more costly to repair. Cars.com, for example, paid a whopping $1,161 just to replace the active air dam on their nicely-equipped half-ton pickup truck.
While investigating a different issue, the service technician discovered the dam’s absence after a diagnostic code for the powertrain control module indicated a dam failure. “A visual inspection showed that the entire deployable dam had been ripped out of the actuators that deploy the unit.”
It seems that a tire tread ripped it out of the car while deployed while driving on the highway. Taking into consideration that the driver didn’t have any alternative but to swerve with a heavy camper hitched out back, it was the right call to plow through the rubber debris at the expense of the air dam.
Excluding the mandated sales tax, the plastic blade cost the Cars.com team 112 dollars and 83 cents. The actuators that move it up or down retail at $241.52 and $218.68, while the technician’s labor adds $588 to the tally.
Money, however, wasn’t the biggest issue of the 2021 Ford F-150 in the featured video. It would take seven weeks between the diagnosis and the repair due to a shortage of parts, which presents a huge problem for work-oriented customers that need to use their pickups day in and day out. Curiously enough, Cars.com registered their highest-mpg tank (22.4 miles per gallon or 10.5 l/100 km) after the aerodynamic dam-delete incident.
To whom it may concern, the most efficient F-150 right now is the rear-driven PowerBoost with 25 mpg (9.4 l/100 km) on the combined cycle.
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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