Even high-tech features sometimes suffer from low-tech issues, and that’s what Ford has discovered as part of its latest recall. The instrument panels in the 2023 Escape and Super Duty line of F-Series trucks could fail as a result of a simple soldering defect.
The issue first came to Ford’s attention in March, after it became aware of an incident in which the digital instrument cluster in a 2023 Super Duty truck refused to illuminate. The case was picked up by the brand’s Critical Concern Review Group, which set about investigating the root cause.
Its inquest found that the instrument panel failed due to a hardware problem, relating to bad solder joints in the remote cluster box. Unfortunately, it thought that the nature of the failure meant that it would only happen early in the part’s lifetime, meaning that Ford focused exclusively on tackling early failures in the assembly plant.
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However, field reports and warranty claims kept coming in, signalling a bigger problem. With the help of its supplier, Visteon, Ford discovered that, in some cases, the bad solder joints were just good enough to run the screen for longer than Ford expected.
As part of its investigation, it found out that the bad screens could have made it into 17,394 Super Duty trucks (including the F-250, F-350, F-450, and the F-550) from the 2023 model year. In addition, it found that the parts could have made it into 21,301 Escapes from the same model year.
In documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Ford reports that it is aware of 84 warranty claims and 36 field reports relating to this issue. Fortunately, it has not received reports of any injuries or accidents as a result of the problem, but will still launch a recall campaign.
Ford plans to start getting in touch with owners on August 14, asking them to return their vehicle to a dealership to have their instrument panel cluster or the cluster module replaced with a new one that has been properly soldered.
