Traconesu
Well-known member
- First Name
- Patrick
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2022
- Threads
- 1
- Messages
- 122
- Reaction score
- 68
- Location
- Quad cities, Illinois
- Vehicles
- Ford lightning platinum
- Occupation
- Retired
I don't believe that button should work when shifter is in any gear.Was pretty scary. I'd gone on a beer & ice run and had 5 cases of beer and two sixteen pound bags of ice in the frunk. Against my better judgement I stacked the two ice bags on the same side as the emergency release. Fantasy draft was starting in 10 minutes, but I was only 5 minutes away from getting back and I was 12th in the order, so all good.
Long story short I had to accelerate decently quick as there was a regular stream of cars coming down the street at that time, and when I did the ice must have shifted, hit the emergency frunk release button, and the frunk flew open before I knew what happened. I obviously couldn't see the road well in front of me, but knew it was clear since I'd just started driving and I could see a smidge under the frunk and out the side window. As you can see from the picture below, I was pretty fortunate that it was easy to pull over.
After pulling to the side of the road I assessed the damage, which initially only appeared to be the case of Ultras that were rolling around the middle of the road (I'm guessing when I decelerated when the frunk flew open it rolled out). However when I tried to get the frunk to go back down nothing happened except a succession of three or four 2-beep notifications. I tried pressing down on the hood, but no joy...it wouldn't budge. I will admit that I didn't try to force it extremely hard, but I definitely gave it a good push. I tried the emergency frunk button again...nothing. I pulled on the red tab where the normal hood release would go and still nothing happened.
Tried calling road side assistance to see if I could get guidance on how to get it to go down...no luck. Basically all they could do was call a tow truck...which wasn't any help. I then tried calling my dealership, but unfortunately nobody was available in service to assist. Nothing in the online manual helped, and I didn't have any tools with me to try unplugging my 12V. Searches on the internet weren't getting me anywhere, and to add insult to injury I ended up auto-drafting my 1st and 2nd picks because I was so preoccupied with the stuck frunk and beers scattered around the highway.
Eventually after nearly 30 minutes of trying the buttons & red tab over and over, I noticed the frunk appeared to be a little lower. I tried the button again and it didn't work, but I was able to manually force it down. There was an issue w/ the latch, but after some poking & prodding it finally worked.
So here I am now...it's working but something is definitely off kilter. At the end of closing it makes a pretty loud noise and the hood is a little misaligned. I made an appointment to take it into the dealer this week and I'm sure it'll be fine, but the moral of the story for me is that the emergency release button is no joke, it works, and I think it works a bit too well. I kind of which it was a latch, and thinking back to the thread I saw here before, I may look to get some sort of cover on is so groceries or other stuff don't shift and cause this to happen again.
IMO this is a pretty material design flaw. They market the heck out of the frunk holding lots of stuff and up to 400 lbs, which almost necessarily means jamming a bunch of stuff in there. Thinking about the two sets of clubs Ford touts, I can easily see either the bottom of the bag or a loose club on the other side easily triggering it if you hit a bump the wrong way. If that happens like it did to me when pulling out hopefully nothing too bad happens, but what if someone is going 70mph in the middle lane of a freeway? The outcome could be catastrophic, and I unfortunately think that it's not if, but WHEN, we'll see more of this happening if they don't do something to change it.
