Hey everyone, I just had an oil change done on my 2013 fx4 f-150. They also installed the factory engine block heater and element. I have 20k miles on it. I have now gone through two tanks of gas and have two main issues.

The first is with the defrost, air is always coming out the defrost vents when the heater is on. My biggest complaint is when all the air is selected to blow towards the floor, feet, a huge volume of air is coming out the defrost vents. Is this normal? The dealership is claiming it is but this has never happened before. Anyone with a 2013 mind doing a test on theirs for me?

My next issue is my fuel economy went from 18.6 lifetime average and is now just above 15 for the past two tanks for gas. No changes in driving style or anything. I noticed the when I got the truck back from having the oil change and block heater installed all of my radio settings were reset (but not the presets). And a lot of the info in the instament cluster display was reset as well. Did they just unplug the battery when they did the install? Or was there some kind of upgrade in software to the truck computer or sync software?


Thanks for your help answering these questions I am very frustrated.

 

It's possible that:

1. They did unhook the battery...for whatever reason

2. They looked to see if Ford had released any PCM or Sync upgrades for your truck...found one...and did the upgrade while they had it. If this is the case, it would've been nice that they told you about it and what they had done. I think it's fairly routine for service techs to hook up to the vehicle computer and let it look to see if any upgrades have been released for it and then load them into the vehicle so you have the latest version.

 

So could the upgrade on the vehicle computer reset any learned driving characteristics that are causing me to get such bad gas mileage? Or could something else be going on?