It is not the dealer denying the warranty. It is Ford. Her explanation is kin of what I thought - purely based on key cycles. Once they deny warranty, that is a huge uphill battle with no real guarantee. Tuning vehicles is a real pay to play gamble.
^^^^
This.
If for example you lose a bearing, bust a hard part not due to pre-ignition, etc. and I think cam phasers; think being the operative word - you might stand a chance if you went all the way, but the difficulty comes from this ‘affirmative defense’ as a plaintiff.
you admit you tuned the truck and seek to prove to a jury your modifications didn’t affect the failed part. Once you admit you tuned the truck, anything “downstream” of your mod has a compromised warranty. That is to say, the manufacturer can assert a warranty denial due to modifications on every repair. You may have to sue for warranty coverage on a pinion gear, transfer case, differential case, transmission hard parts, anything that could be affected by more power output. Is it likely that a tune caused a pinion gear too fail? No, but likely is irrelevant legally.
Ford and other manufacturers have a dedicated staff of lawyers who answer lemon lawsuits. They also have “relationships” with numerous qualified ‘expert witnesses’ who will testify that whatever modification you made definitely caused the failure and justifies the manufacturer’s warranty denial.
You have to hire expert witnesses and you may have the tuner or programmer called- by the manufacturer to testify. This would be a bad thing, because the manufacturer’s engineering team will submit questions that no one person could sufficiently answer. No practical amount of reverse engineering will net you the results as a ground up engineering effort. Eventually, they’ll be asked if they accounted for the widget voltage adjustment to impart a linear increase in oil pressure directly proportional to fuel pressure and injector cycle, factoring in the coriolis effect. There will of course be no right answer and everyone in the room will be dumbfounded. The jury would be faced with the maker of the vehicle who knows it from the ground up and can reasonably convince an unknowing jury to side with them.
Your expert would have to be able to survive the barrage of engineering questions, and convince the jury that the defendant’s witnesses were misleading, wrong or incompetent to speak on the matters. Impeaching a witness is hard to do but possible. Manufacturers do lose these cases periodically, but usually it’s under favorable conditions.
I’m not sure that low compression in 2 cylinders is something the tune is going to do to an engine, even at an accelerated pace, but they’re not challenging it. Probably because it’s 50/50 prospect on prevailing and would probably cost ~10-15k up front to cover costs to start the process and get most of the way through. You can have the motor replaced for less and that’s one reason that manufacturers succeed as many times as they do for warranty denials.
That's the only reason I clicked on it!
