The Ford Mustang has always been an incredibly popular vehicle to tune, which makes sense given the fact that it’s a performance-focused coupe often modified by owners. However, long before the S650-generation pony car debuted, we learned that it would be more difficult for third-party companies to tune due to its new Fully-Networked Vehicle (FNV) electrical architecture, which brings various benefits like over-the-air updates and much-needed cybersecurity, but it also largely locks down the vehicle from being tuned as well. According to Ford CEO Jim Farley, there were other reasons behind this decision, however.
“The aftermarket is a real opportunity, but it’s also a big challenge for us because a lot of people like to write software in the control module that controls the powertrain to get better performance. But what they don’t know, and what the user may not be aware of, is that all the reliability and the quality issues that might come up are very expensive. My daughter’s boyfriend is one of these people,” Farley said during a recent appearance on The Verge‘s Decoder podcast.
“He bought a brand new F-150, he’s got a supercharger on it. He recently got a bunch of error codes because he updated the ECU against Ford’s standards, and now he needs thousands of dollars of expensive repairs because the vehicle has started chewing its camshaft. It was great that he could get 650 horsepower out of his EcoBoost F-150. He didn’t think about what he was doing to the reliability of the vehicle, but we have to at Ford.”
“All I would say is that it’s a tough problem to solve. We always want to give customers a chance to tune their vehicles, but we actually know a lot about the reliability of the vehicle. Are we as a brand going to let our quality reputation suffer to give a person the ability to modify the vehicle? I think that’s a hard compromise for us to make.”
It’s worth noting that Farley’s comments here are a bit confusing, given the fact that we doubt his daughter’s boyfriend removed his F-150 EcoBoost’s turbos in favor of a supercharger, but we do know that tuned EcoBoost engines have, in some cases, proven to be problematic as of late. Regardless, HP Tuners was able to crack Ford’s S650 Mustang ECU just this past June, and is already offering tuning support for that model, as well as others utilizing FNV.
Comments
Can we fire him already? If his daughters’ BF put a supercharger on an Ecoboost to dual charge it then he deserves whatever happened. Guessing he did not though, but Fartley here is so oblivious to what Ford makes that isn’t electric he has no idea how stupid and nonsensical his story is.
Tbf it does say at the end of the article that the boyfriend removed the turbos. But yeah cars should be customizable, he’s crazy for saying mods failing are a reflection of manufacturer error
Sounds to me like a lack of brains runs throughout the family.
Jim” podcast’s” the worse CEO ever in Ford history and no ones knows why he is still in place ??? He blames everyone except his own incompetence …
NO COMMENT, something you might want to think about. Even a Fool can appear to be smart if he learns to stay silent. That way no one will know just how dumb you are until you speak. You may want to practice this advice.
His daughter’s boyfriend probably had the 5.0 V8 in his truck. Just saying.
He will just give him something else.
what a jackass
Why is everybody picking on Farley? He has to be the coolest CEO Ford has ever had. He talks the talk and walks the walk.