What caused this, you might ask. Turns out the automated tool that torques the wheels for the left side was down for repairs on the days in question. This forced the assembly plant workers to perform manual torquing of these lug nuts and led to not applying enough torque to secure the wheels to the trucks and SUVs on that side.
The right hand side automated lug gun was working properly and why those wheels are unaffected by this recall. The question still remains, even with a manual installation, how someone could still miss this as you’d think checking wheel torque with a digital or even a click-type torque wrench would show something is wrong very quickly and adjust before these vehicles leave the plant.
We’ve reached out to Ford to see what exactly went wrong, if there will be a fix, and what will be done in case it’s more than just a retorquing of the wheels—since there is the possibility of damage to the wheels and lug nuts due to this issue, if these vehicles were driven long enough on loose lug nuts. We’ll update this story once we hear back.
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