Ford service departments need customer service training

[Wendy]

My dealer's service department is pretty good. I wouldn't paint all dealers with a broad brush because of a bad experience with one.

I focus on the service department more than the sales department when purchasing a vehicle because you are going to be interacting with service more.

One of the first questions I ask before buying a vehicle is whether the dealer has a loaner fleet. When I took my Lightning in for any CSP or warranty work I always drive away in a loaner with under 5K miles. They can keep the truck as long as they want.

I have been very happy with Bickford in Washington. And the loaners have all had under 100 miles on them. So not too upset when they have to keep the truck longer. Since most of the things are ‘non-EV’ such as parking sensors I expect they are dealing with that on ICE too.
One time they did have a hard time finding out how to get the wipers to ‘sense’; I was tired of waiting so I picked it up. On the way home the wipers turned themselves on . And my doors WAL’d. I was happy.

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[PrimeRisk]

You certainly can blame the Dealers and their Service Manager for lack of training. I hope you have another Ford dealer close enough so you don't have to go back.

Unfortunately we Lightning owners may be in for a grim future with service. I live in Denver-Metro and we have a lot of Ford dealers. The closest Ford dealer to us sell the Lightning and Mach-E, but will not service them for anything. The next closest dealership where we did buy the Lightning seemed fine at first, but after dealing with our first issue it became glaringly clear that they had little or no training on the EV models and didn't even know enough to know that they didn't know. We now take it outside of Denver-Metro to a dealer that appears to have at least one competent EV tech on staff, though the Service Managers are hit-or-miss. The problem is if it needs to go into the dealership for anything, we have a 2-3 week wait until there is an opening in the schedule.

The grim reality is that there are indications that the Lightning will be discontinued and Ford continues to pull back on their EV investments. Our trucks may end up in the junkyard, not because of them wearing out, but because we can't find a qualified tech within 1000 miles.