Back from trip. Lengthy truck review.

I got back from my trip last night.  One of the things that we did while I was down there was Heather and I visited the Saltpeter caves.  This cave was very different from the other caves I have visited.  There weren't many geological formations in this cave, it was more of a mine.  The rocks were mostly dirt/sandstone (saltpeter, which is used to make gunpowder) which is why it looks like they dug out the path (because they did).  In addition, the cave was mostly a dry cave.  The water is what brings in the minerals that creates the stalactites and stalagmites, so outside of a couple of very small features, there wasn't much in the way of that in this cave.  It was a fun learning experience, and is definitely unique among the caves I have visited.

The pictures can be found here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WvDE9AZWoxn5QmQd6 

I did something a little different this time to minimize the amount of vacation time I had to expend.  I drove down on Wednesday after work, and then worked remotely Thursday half day (I flexed the other half day off).  I worked from a truck stop in Maryland.  While the remote work from the truck stop was less than ideal, I at least had a nice view (except for the bug splats).  It got really hot in the truck though.

I also got a picture of a sunrise while I was there that was quite pretty.

The other big project was replacing the dishwasher.  I had installed mine, but it was a countertop unit that I put in a cabinet and hard-plumbed in, so not quite the same thing.  The old one was a real pain to get out.  The fake wood flooring was a lip that we had to lift the dishwasher over (which of course meant lifting the counter).  

The dishwasher was a bit of a fiasco.  It started with the electric.  When the breaker labeled dishwasher was turned off, the display on the dishwasher died.  I then went to cut the wire (this one was hardwired in) and got a reminder on why you always double check with a meter.  Fortunately the insulation on the handles of the wire cutters did their job and I didn't get zapped.  I might buy new crimpers, though they survived the surprise short without serious damage.  

The next fiasco is that apparently the drain pipe on the sink, which has a barb on it to attach the drain  hose to was pretty much flat.  I have never seen a flat one; they are normally (I would have said always before this trip) angled up so that water from the sink doesn't backfeed into the dishwasher.  So my foot got a boiling bath.  

It didn't install nicely, but the new one is in.  The cabinets are kinda wimpy, so it isn't held in real well, but should be fine as long as the cabinets hold up.  Just for amusement I still play the scene from Fifth Element in my head every time I see Auto-wash.

The other thing I did while I was down there was pick up the last cabinet.  I got my Dad some cabinets for Father's day, but they didn't have the large base cabinet when I got them delivered, so I went and picked one up while I was there.  The one I picked up though was from Lowes, and the ordered ones were from Home Depot.  Cabinets are supposed to be standardized sizes.  Apparently Lowes and Home Depot have other ideas though, thus the gap under the countertop.  So much for standards.  Fortunately the packaging boards from the dishwasher are the perfect thickness to shim the countertop, so we have shim boards for it.

I got home last night.  Not too much to see, it was raining most of the drive home, but before it started yesterday, I at least got to see some interesting mist on the mountains in Maryland and Pennsylvania.  

My truck now has 2500 miles on it.  Over 2000 of those were this trip.  The computer for the truck seems optimistic for gas mileage, but I was averaging well over 20 for the trip.  The tanks measured 23.9, 22.9, Forgot to measure, 22.7, and TBD (I haven't filled it since I got home, but the computer claims I got 24.7 on the tank that is in progress).  On the way home, I only stopped once for gas which was nice.  I filled up in Maryland and made it home with right around a quarter tank.  

That said, now that I have some significant time and miles on the truck, here is my review:

The good:

• The range.  I haven't pushed it yet, but the 36 gallon tank combined with the excellent mileage (for a pickup) is nice.  Really nice.  I only needed to fill up once on the trip back from KY.  And I still have enough gas to go to work for a week.
• The truck is very quiet and smooth for the most part (outside of the hard transmission shifts).  The Pirelli tires they put on it are excellent at eliminating road noise, and stick to the road really good.
• Despite having fewer seat adjustments, the truck is a whole lot more comfortable.  This combined with the range made it seem like I made a lot better time on the trip than I really did; I hit lots of traffic jams in PA and WV (a lot more than normal) and never set the cruise >72mph, but still got home in about 16 hours driving time which is pretty decent because I was only stopping every 4-5 hours instead of 2-3 hours.
• It doesn't gear hunt (at least while not heavily loaded).  I used cruise the whole trip with no stupid downshifts on the hills in WV.  It seems pretty good when it does downshift at knowing how much to downshift; it can (and does) shift more than one gear at a time. That is a very good thing considering it is a 10-speed transmission and I would think more gears would make that problem worse.
• Despite being among the smaller engines I have owned, it has a lot of pull at the low end.  It didn't downshift for the hills in KY, and it can pull itself and accelerate at 1000RPM even in top gear.
• The truck has a bunch of settings I was surprised to see, things like you can set the fob to open all the doors or just the drivers door.
• The back doors open all the way.
• At first I thought it was rather odd to include a dash screen that has pretty much nothing on it (they call it the calm screen) but on the highway it quickly became my go-to screen because of less distractions.
• The truck doesn't have great driveability feedback, but it is a whole lot better than both the Nissan and the Toyota.  The brakes are excellent, the gas pedal, while soft, isn't too soft, the steering isn't turnable with a feather, things like that.  
• The windows have auto up and down, and it is both of the front windows.
• Ford needs to advertise these things better; the truck came with features I didn't expect.  Some, like the telescoping wheel I planned to just do without, but some I figured I would need to add aftermarket like remote start and the flat four wiring (the website only mentioned the 7 pin RV plug).  There are some other usability ones too, like the clamp pockets in the tailgate.
• So far, all the annoying/broken "safety features" I have found can be disabled; things like the automatic wipers, automatic braking and collision detection.
• Even though I haven't tried most of it yet, the truck supports all the common infotainment things; it supports Android and Apple Auto, has Bluetooth (which really ought to be standard by 2022 but isn't), and supports USB thumb drive audio.
• See the cons about the software behind them, but I like that there are real buttons for all the common things to adjust on the road.  I am one of those people that feel that buttons are better than touch screens.
• It has six post holes in the bed-rails, not four.  That might be an 8' box thing, but it is still good to see should I ever build something to sit over the bed.
• It is nice that all the power stuff isn't immediately dead when you shut the truck off.  The 12V plugs stay live for a while (maybe 20 minutes, and they stay live even if you open the door).  It would be nice if the USB did too, but since it is expected to be used for connection to the infotainment, I understand why the USB is tied to the radio.  Likewise I understand why the AC plug doesn't stay live.  That is a really fast way to kill your battery, since it draws a lot more than the 12v plug.  Since my cooler runs off 12V, that is the most important one anyways.

The meh:

• As you would expect with a blunt nosed pickup, the mileage drops off quickly with speed.  It seems to be like the Tundra, where at 60mph I get 24+mpg, but at 70mph I get ~22mpg and at 75mph it is ~20mpg
• The computer mileage is optimistic, though I have never seen an accurate one. 
• It is purely cosmetic, but their animation of the truck when you start it is inaccurate, the animation is of a different body type.  
• Because the bed liner is a lot thinner and is a softer plastic than my old one, it has mildly deformed already.
• The truck gets really really hot in the sun.  This was expected (thus not a con) but the dark gray was the only interior color option.
• The windows are slow to react.  Not really a problem, but if you go to open the driver window just a little bit (so not hitting the auto), it takes a half second before the window does anything.  It is only the front windows too, the back ones are fine.
• The transmission feels like it shifts hard, though >95% of my driving thus far has been Eco mode, and it might be because it doesn't shift until it really has to in Eco mode.  This might become a con if it slams or shifts hard in other modes.  In general, I like its resiliency to downshift which is good for gas mileage, albeit at the expense of lugging the engine.
• The truck often displays warnings about things that this trim truck won't ever have and isn't available.  Like the backup camera displays something like "full surrounding cameras not available" even though that wasn't even an option on this truck.  
• The backup camera system is unhappy (though it does still work) if the tailgate is down.
• I haven't tried it yet, but I am curious if the tailgate is removable.  With electronics in the tailgate, that isn't a guarantee.
• UPDATE - I went out and looked when I got home, and no, my tailgate isn't removable.  At least not easily.
  
• The tailgate doesn't have the soft down hinges, but is light enough that I don't care and won't hurt anything if it slams. 
• The two speedometers (the digital one and the analog one) don't match and neither match the "your speed is" things.  The digital speedometer was pretty consistently almost 1mph less than the analog one, and it was ~0.5-0.75mph higher than all the displays on the road.  Not a big deal, the speedometer is never perfectly accurate once the original tires are replaced anyways, but it is still a little disappointing that it came from the factory without those lining up and being accurate.

The bad: 

• The climate control system is infuriating.  It doesn't turn the AC off when you turn off the AC (basically switch it to vent), it just runs the AC less (I am guessing only when there is spare power or something because it isn't consistent).  The problem with that is you go from it blowing exterior air (which for the trip home was around 68-73 degrees) and then when there is enough refrigerant pressure to actually air condition built up, it randomly blows air that is 10-15 degrees cooler for several seconds.  Raising the temperature setting didn't change the behavior, it just raised those numbers until you got to the point of heating the air.  As near as I can tell, the only way to actually turn the AC off is to completely turn the climate control system to off.  You can minimize the effect by running with more fan (more volume means less air temperature differential) but it is still at best obnoxious and noticeable.  I have also noticed that the center vents are a lot stronger/get more air than the edge vents.
• Ford's software team isn't good at software. 
• I have found that most of their software only features don't work well.  
• The lane keep assist has alarm and assist modes.  I quickly found out why it defaults to alarm only (which seems odd on its face).  The first time you use it on assist, it becomes crystal clear why; it can see the lanes in the road but it has no algorithm to do the corrections; it turns and badly oversteers the other way.  
• While I don't care too much about this feature, if it worked well, it would be nice to have so that you could eat a slightly messy sub that occasionally needs two hands while driving for example.  The truck pretty clearly has the hardware (sensors/cameras) to do it; it is just the software sucks.
• Their "stop and rest" warnings are obnoxious.  I am not sure how they are programmed (at first blush it appears to go off every time you cross over a line in the road at night, sometimes even if you use your turning signal), but it annoyed me enough to get turned off very quickly.
• The infotainment system is uninspiring.  To be fair, I knew this when I bought the truck; the Ford Sync system is routinely derided by reviewers.
• If you use the steering wheel controls, they routinely take seconds to actually show up on the display, though the effect happens quickly (things like changing the volume).
• Its randomizer certainly didn't feel random.  One of the flash drives had several hundred songs and it seemed to only play maybe 40 or 50 of them over and over and rarely pulled in the others.  This is a common software randomization issue that Ford didn't bother to fix.
• My biggest gripe with the infotainment system though is that the USB cuts out occasionally, which pushes the radio back to FM, but if it does that, the USB drive has to be removed and re-inserted before it can be used again.
• It also isn't clear what the radio supports for file systems and file types.  I saw a lot of "media type not supported" which I assumed was the flac audio, but it played several flac albums on the way home.  I had an NTFS formatted stick which it detected and displayed the name, but when you go to play it there was just simply nothing on it.  No error like unsupported file system or anything, just nothing there.  This can largely be cleared up by reading the manual, but who does that?  It isn't a big software effort to help the users either.
• Just to get a dig on Toyota, a Japanese designed truck that couldn't display Japanese characters, the Ford, an American(ish) designed truck, can display Japanese characters just fine.
• This isn't really a con per se, but I am curious why it has support for playing video files (though it only plays the audio track and not the video) but it doesn't seem to support some common audio formats.  
• It is really inconsistent with what it doesn't allow you to do while driving.  I scrolled four or five screens of songs on the flash drive (looking for a particular song) before it said "for your safety, you can't do that while driving"
• A few things don't remember their settings.
• Some of them look intentional, like the driving mode.  The driving mode is obnoxious because it starts to prompt you when you start the truck if you want to return to the previous mode (it should automatically do it IMO), but that gets preempted by the popup for the screen brightness, and then it pops up again.  It looks and feels very amateurish, and almost like Ford's engineers never actually tested it.
• It is kind of annoying that things like the headlights don't remember their settings.  They go back to auto every time you start the truck.
• Sometimes it is kind of random too, like for example the fog lights which turn on with the headlights just randomly stopped doing that until I manually turn them back on.
• This may not be software (though I would assume it is), but it sometimes won't go into park from reverse, it really fights it.  When it does that, I have found it is easiest to go to neutral and then try to put it in park, but I don't know why park is locked out, and I can't consistently recreate it.
• The fog lights are worthless.  I will need to see if they can be adjusted; they are pointed to the ground below the hood in the road.
• The headlights themselves are pretty mediocre.  I would say the headlights are a downgrade from the Toyota.  I will probably upgrade the bulbs to LEDs to get more lumens on the road.
• The mirrors are disappointing.  The mirrors aren't large (for a pickup anyways) to begin with, but they cut the glass at an angle which means you lose more of it if you keep the edge of the truck in the mirror (I usually do for a reference point).  That means the mirrors are pointed in more than they were on the Toyota.  Add to that the outer edge is cut out for a blind spot mirror (which while a nice feature isn't really one I need and would prefer to not have), and you get a mirror that feels like it is the size of a small car mirror.  It is tolerable for normal driving, but I expect it to really suck when I pull the camper.
• The truck has surprisingly poor visibility because of the way it is sloped.  It is shorter than my prior pickups in the front, but the back end is so high you almost can't step onto the bumper because of how tall it is.  Combined with the mirrors, you have to be more cautious with visibility.
• To add insult to injury, the inside rear view mirror is partially obstructed by the center seat's headrest.  The headrest should be removable, once I figure out how to do it though.
• The mirrors are heated, but the heaters aren't good enough (nor does it stay on long enough when activated) to evaporate water.  It defogs the mirrors OK, but time will tell with their wimpy heaters and the fact that they only stay on for a couple of minutes at a time if they can melt snow.
• You have to fold the middle seat in the front down to have any cupholders.
  

If I were to give it a rating, I am torn between a 7 and 8 out of ten.  While as is typical with my reviews, the cons list is larger than the pros list, the only things that are significant enough to ding my rating are the climate control (which is a pretty large ding) and just poor software in general.  Things like the headlights and mirrors are disappointing, but they aren't really a problem, they are just not good.  Most of the software stuff isn't really stuff I care about too much, it just looks bad and unprofessional for Ford in general and means I have to have a startup sequence, like back in the early 90s with the gold Buick where everything was a manual switch.  I still really like the truck, and thus far it is a notable improvement over the Toyota in all of the important ways that I have tested (I haven't towed with the F-150 yet).  Traveling in this truck will actually be pleasant.  Ford thought of a lot of the little things that are important to trucks (and yes, I count the 36gal gas tank as a truck feature), it is just that their software team needs to be revamped.  I should also note that my software gripes thus far are non-critical systems, unlike the Toyota and its transmission programming woes.  

I have started filling out the form for the variance, but haven't finished it yet, but that is at the top of my priority list.  Given that it is September already, I think it is time to look forward to winterizing, and if they make me do anything this fall, it will have an adverse impact on my ability to do things like buy a snowblower for the tractor.  This winter is supposed to be rough from everything I read, but they said last winter would be snowy and I only cleared the driveway a half dozen times all winter.  I am still on the fence as to whether it is worth paying several grand for a three point snowblower for my tractor is worthwhile.