Those of you worried about how well the aluminum body of a 2015 Ford F-150 would hold up under typical truck duties now have Edmunds to thank, as they took a sledgehammer to their brand new truck.
Edmunds took delivery of their $52,000 F-150 one day, and had associate editor Travis Langness hit its rear quarter panel with a sledgehammer the next day.
The first part of the test proves that the F-150’s aluminum body can hold up pretty well to an unusual assault, so those of you who street-park your truck in a rowdy college town can rest a little more easily.
But the real test came when they took the truck to the body shop and had the panel fixed. This shows how well an aluminum panel can be repaired, and also how much it costs in relation to a typical steel panel and whether there are any other hurdles – given that this F-150 is fairly new.
Take a look at their full rundown (parts 1, 2 and 3 and the videos below, but the big takeaways from the repair costs are, 1.) That’s a really expensive taillight to fix ($887 for one with the blind-spot system and LED in it) and you’d be pissed off if it got even a tiny crack in the lens, and 2.) An aluminum body panel can be four times as expensive as a steel panel to repair.
How many F-150s are going to be written off by insurance companies because of that troubling math?
Update: Ford Truck Communications Manager Mike Levine responded to Carscoops Thursday:
Edmunds’ experience with repair time and cost at one particular dealer in California is not at all what new F-150 customers should expect. Based on the Edmunds’ story, the repair should have taken less than 10 hours and not 20 hours. Ten hours is comparable with the time it would have taken to repair a steel vehicle with similar damage, based on historical data collected from repairs of other Ford vehicles with aluminum body panels.
Hey, at least it’s still tough.