I recently purchased an '08 F250 with the 6.8L V-10. I pull a 5th wheel RV and would like to add some performance upgrades, while maybe increasing my mpg at the same time. My last truck was an F150 with the 5.4L to which I added a cold air intake, a MagnaFlow cat back exhaust, and a Hypertech tuner. AFTER making those upgrades I was told that some or all of them may have voided my warranty. How can I find out for sure which upgrades are safe to do? I see that K&N advertises their air filters as being safe for all manufacturer's warranties...
Thanks in advance for any help!

 

It really depends on how mod friendly your dealer is. If you do get a programmer I would highly suggest you return the truck to stock before taking it in for any work. Most void them for programmers. Now for everything else its up in the air like I said

 

All aftermarket parts have the potential to void your warranty. Now we can get into some sticky "discussions" and philosophical debates as to rather or not they should void the warranty if you just have those parts on or not, but you do run the risk of it being voided. Now I well say this, they "should" only void the part of the warranty where the aftermarket products affects, but since your talking about the biggest part of the warranty(which is drivetrain) then if they do void it, you might as well not have warranty at all.

Do what you want, just realize that any aftermarket product has the potential to void the part of your warranty that the product affects.

 

Technically under the Moss-Magnusson (sp.) act no mod voids your warranty. Basically what it says (and I'm am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) is that if you modify your vehicle while under warranty and your modification results in a failure you are responsible for that failure and any associated failure. The problem is that in reality a dealer / manufacturer only has to say or claim that your mod caused a problem and then it's a battle of the wallets to see who can spend the most on expert testimony and in this case even with Detroit losing a lot of money these days the odds are you're going to blink first.

In many cases if you have a problem on a modded vehicle your local dealer won't even do diagnosis work until you return your vehicle to stock configuration.

Net - net: modding doesn't in and of itself void your warranty but be prepared to pay if you want to play because it can get costly if you do have a problem.

 

That's why I said that aftermarket parts had the potential to void the part of the warranty that it would affect.

 

You need to read the rest of it. There's more. They can link any performance mod part to any failed part to void the warranty since one system affects another.

A tuner will infact void your warranty. The ECM stores the number of flashes that have been performed on it. If the number doesn't match Fords records, good bye warranty! So, reflashing back to stock does absolutely nothing.

That's why there is so many 6.0Ls around with under 15k but with blown motors in them. People jacked with the tune, blew up thier brand new junk and the dealer said hell-no.

 

Thanks for all the great advice. I guess I'll leave my truck stock, at least for the time being. After all, the reason I upgraded from my F150 to the F250 was so I could have the extra horsepower and torque for pulling my 5th wheel!

 

Now that's a big no-no. I guess I'll have to go through my little deal again. Putting a tuner on it doesn't mean that it's going to automatically blow up, or even the majority of time mean that it's going to blow up. It does present a greater chance but it doesn't mean that it will.

A person could have had problems and the tuner brought it to their attention, but that doesn't mean that the tuner actually was the one thing that caused it.

At best people that claim what you did have this for evidence: "I got my new truck put a tuner on it, next thing I know I have headgasket problems, so the tuner caused it"(or something to that effect). Now could the tuner have caused it, sure but what the person is using as proof doesn't give enough support to that. If you have problem with that, I can bring up a silly example but it will follow that same logical structure in order to show how silly that logic is.

Now I'm sure people are tired of my bringing this up time and time again, but when people say that "jacking" with the truck's computer programming is why so many people with trucks with less then 15k on them and have blown motors, I get a little uppity about it when the evidence they have is so slight and at best shows a correlation. However correlation is not causation.

 

I have a hydro-locked-busted-rod 6.0 in my driveway right now that a buddy put a tune on that claimed "an instant 100hp". It's been there for a month now since he can't do anything with it. Two years ago, when I lived in Tucson, A guy I raced with at TRP bought a new 6.0 truck. He put a 75hp tune on it. It died about 3 weeks later and was sitting with the bad engine for 4 months until he could come up with the money to replace it. Both times Ford told them that the tune caused the failure, which it did, and voided the engine portion of thier warranties. The Tucson truck actually got his trans warranty voided too since the dealer said he "exceeded" the max power the trans could handle due to the tune.

I've seen lots of them survive with no problem but at the same time, I've known quite a few to end up high-and-dry because of a tuner. I'm not saying everyone will have this experience, but it's a good caution.

 

One is for sure due to racing and the other I'm willing to bet it was from racing as well. I can blow up a stock truck racing it, now with the tuner I can really blow it up, but I'm willing to put that more on the driver then I am on the tuner itself. More often then not(and that means anywhere from 50.5%(technically speaking here) of the time and/or higher) people that buy tuners are looking for the hopeful bump up in mileage and/or power.

If y'all are racing, well then ya I would expect it to brake on you that is a harsh environment for engines to work under, something is going to give rather it's tuned or stock programming. Now I'm sure that alot of people(myself included) enjoyed that initial newness of that new found power, but I think it's the minority of those that did those launches to the extreme that whine more then the others.


I don't know the specifics of the first example(although like I said before I'm willing to bet it was also from racing), but there are more people then not that don't race with these trucks with a tuner and they should be at a lower risk level then those that you talked about(unless that first example is something other then what I thinking it was from).

Yes caution should be observed, but in all honesty the examples that you cite are from where the truck is in a harsher environment in both examples(atleast from what I have on hand, that first example once again could change depending on what you tell me next) and because of that one could only expect something to break eventually rather it was stock, tuned or whatever.

 

Racing, will also void the warranty.
I have read where Porsche, BMW and some other manufactures Google the owners name and finds that they were racing with a local club, autocross, time trial etc, and the dealer sends them away.
This is with no mods, and it can be argued that the cars were designed to be driven this way.
So what is your warranty worth, that is what you need to ask yourself.

George