The call—surprisingly from Ford's PR team instead of its customer service arm—was concerning a high-voltage battery pack degradation issue with our F-150 Lightning Lariat Extended Range. Our truck, the rep said, was part of a pilot program tracking early-build 2022 Lightnings, and, when remotely examining our truck, Ford engineers discovered a battery module was malfunctioning. Although the truck, FordPass app, and the third-party monitoring service Recurrent were reporting all systems were nominal, we were highly encouraged to get our Lightning into the dealer immediately.
Not wanting to deal with an inconvenient stop on an upcoming road trip, we acquiesced. The PR rep said that for most customers, a dedicated customer satisfaction program agent would call owners to inform them of this not-a-recall, personally setting up the dealership appointment on behalf of the owners in order to ensure the dealer was properly notified of the issue and that it had parts on hand. In this case, Ford's PR team had stepped in to serve as our agent, helping to book us an appointment for the following week at a local dealer.
True to their word, two days later we swapped the Mach-E keys for our Lightning's, with the repairs all covered under warranty. Despite sounding scary and potentially playing into all the fearmongering over EVs, we believe proactive service actions like this—especially where the inconvenience is mitigated—can go a long way toward soothing an anxious public's (and yeah, I suppose my grandparents') worries about EVs. After all, although our F-150 Lightning's issue was novel, the experience was not unlike recall actions F-150 owners have dealt with the past 75 years.
This content was originally published here.
