2026 Super Duty PowerBoost

[Snakebitten]

It's not the HV battery in the Powerboost that gobbles Payload. It's tiny, by Hybrid battery standards.
Certainly not the battery alone, anyways. There's a lot of ancillary hardware to turn a 3.5 Ecoboost into a Hybrid.
And Ford gimps the Payload on the Powerboost arbitrarily. It could be whatever they want it to be. All the manufacturers fence the 1/2 ton category intentionally, in my opinion. Borderline conspiracy stuff. ???

3/4 & 1 ton is protected turf.

The HDPP F150 was proof that a 1/2 ton could carry weight. But between 2012 and now, year by year Ford narrowed the options you could build the HDPP. So much so that now they are only available in a stripped work build.

Guys with Lariat CrewCab HDPP F150's are still out there. They know what they have. They are milking them for every mile they can get.

My brother from another mother replaced his 2001 F250 with a 2018 HDPP F150 XLT Ecoboost. He vows to never let it die.

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[WhiteLightningnshitshadow]

Lol a stock f250 can push 22mpg if youre careful from what Ive seen. The hybrid, if given a bigger battery, should be a solid 27 mixed imho. Gotta pay me dividends for the added complexity and reduced payload.

 

[Snakebitten]

So you have owned and towed with an F150 with ~2700lbs of Payload?

His wife would beg to differ after spending many thousands of miles in the passenger seat of both trucks. She doesn't know how or why, but she does know that the F150 is quieter, more comfortable, and far nicer when they are unhooked from the RV and going for dinner.

He doesn't disagree.

The only thing that sucks about the HDPP that Ford offers today is that Ford won't let you build one with the creature comforts that his wife is accustomed to.

 

[JExpedition07]

His and his wives opinions are just incorrect simply put. A modern F-250 with the 6.7 PS or 7.3 Godzilla next to an HDPP is a pretty much a joke. There is no contest or debate to be had here lol. A half ton will never play in the HD sandbox.

Small rear end, less spring, the HDPP frame is still 60% thinner than a standard F-250 frame. Light as a feather. No cast iron engine option on offer. There is really no threat there to any serious HD truck.

Not once have I ever seen anyone with a 7.3 V8 or 6.7 PS have to pull over to cool off or run bags to keep the headlights from pointing at the sky. That happens every day on these half tons.

 

[Snakebitten]

You obviously have a single dominating aspect in mind with your comparison. HP/Torque?

And you are right if that is the only criteria to decide on.

 

[JExpedition07]

Nope. Braking, spring rate, curb weight, GVWR, GRAWR, GFAWR, cooling capacity, wheelbase, engine braking, longevity, torsional rigidity all favor the F-250 vs an HDPP. HP and Torque are at the bottom of my list for towing safety. 1000 lb ft of torque doesn’t stop the tail from wagging the dog.

Take a a look at even the base Dana axle in an F-250 and compare to an F-150 Sterling (even the Max Tow). There is no comparison between the two. F-250 kills the F-150 if you want to tow or haul.

 

[HammaMan]

Why are we assuming this is going to be gas instead of deez?

Ford would be smart to make it work well enough for welders and let it go into the dually as well as the standard bed 6.5s.

Soot, soot, and soot.

What'd be really interesting to see is a 40kWh PHEV attached to the PB's motor. Needs more intelligent understanding of the roads / route planning (easy to do) and/or a load resistor one for engine braking. A proper e motor for 850tq and ever so slightly larger turbos.

 

[amschind]

I would love to see a scaled down Powerstroke mated to the 100 HP Aviator hybrid motor with maybe a 4 kWh battery and 10R140. The 3.0l was perfect in terms of size, but it had no chance against American emissions unless you did a DPF and EGR delete on day one.

I would also love to see them address cooling in an intelligent manner. Overall, I am super excited.

 

[Snakebitten]

Nope. Braking, spring rate, curb weight, GVWR, GRAWR, GFAWR, cooling capacity, wheelbase, engine braking, longevity, torsional rigidity all favor the F-250 vs an HDPP. HP and Torque are at the bottom of my list for towing safety. 1000 lb ft of torque doesn’t stop the tail from wagging the dog.

Take a a look at even the base Dana axle in an F-250 and compare to an F-150 Sterling (even the Max Tow). There is no comparison between the two. F-250 kills the F-150 if you want to tow or haul.

But with the Payload capacity of the once enviable HDPP having far more headroom than the average F150, there's a range of RVs that wouldn't warrant the compromises required to daily an F250 unloaded.

A ~7000lb RV taxes an average F150 with 1500 lbs of Payload, but the HDPP still had the 1500 lbs available AFTER hitching the RV to it.

 

[HammaMan]

So far I've found 1 bent frame (13th gen+) outside of an accident, it was an overloaded 2.7 screw (baby frame) running 50% over its rated towing using airbags, hauling gravel in a dump trailer that found a "hidden" speed bump at 25mph. It bent the frame at the airbags that had to have been maxed out to keep that 2.7 single leaf off the bump stops. These aren't your grandpa's trucks.

There's greater than 7mil 13gen+ F150s on the road with people that aren't afraid to abuse them and between frame bending reports and axles breaking, it takes A LOT of abuse or a manufacturing defect to damage them. We know why the PBs have been slowly derated in towing -- the rad is insufficient for high/hot/heavy. Ford has ALL of our telemetry. They know more about the trucks than the owners do. Given the verbiage of farleys latest tweet regarding PPOB, it appears the trucks call home when they're exceeding 1kW of power output.

I have no doubt that when towing, they've got parameters set to begin storing/transmitting data when certain events/thresholds occur -- as in the fidelity of data collection depends on the variables at play. At least daily they call home with a cursory overview of daily activity, and when the vehicle is really doing some work, they begin collecting A LOT of data. That data's value to the engineering team is a gold mine. With the proper ML behind it, they can likely tell not only the mass of the trailer, but its aerodynamic profile as well. They can even ascertain the quality of fuel you're using. Hopefully before too long we'll see predictive service alerts as they'll be able to tell when a part or subsystem is failing. The only thing that sucks about that is if you have a factory warranty, they'll be able to tell if it will fail outside of warranty and at that point they'll likely not alert you of that. This can be done with yesterday's technology FWIW, they just need to up their game. With the guys they've been able to get from tesla, I'd be very surprised if this isn't already going on behind the scenes. From the wiper recall alone, they made clear they're using predictive modeling.

The predictive service alerts should be used to fix all vehicles despite the bean counter's desires. Customer satisfaction / brand quality should be the primary focus. Take for instance the reports of ABS units taking a shit. We need to get everyone with ABS failures to report them to NHTSA so ford is forced to act. Given the report of one user saying there's 280+ backorders for ABS units and the fact we've seen no less than 3 reports, that seems to track with each forum report representing 100 actual instances as was illustrated with the HD axle bolt failure.

 

[HammaMan]

I would love to see a scaled down Powerstroke mated to the 100 HP Aviator hybrid motor with maybe a 4 kWh battery and 10R140. The 3.0l was perfect in terms of size, but it had no chance against American emissions unless you did a DPF and EGR delete on day one.

I would also love to see them address cooling in an intelligent manner. Overall, I am super excited.

The problem with modern diesels is the emissions nonsense that still isn't settled. At 80k miles the EGR system needs torn down and cleaned. Diesels are best suited for being run hard -- I don't see, at this point in time at least, that OEMs have built them to a point where they're suitable for grocery getter applications. They should really put some $ into creating HHO cells for hydrogen injection to keep them clean. It's amazing what a little bit of hydrogen can do for diesels in both emissions and soot. HHO alone could allow for EGR delete as NOX emissions vanish.

The downside of course is that an HHO generator creates a perfect mix of explosive gas. There are cell designs that capture hydrogen only while venting the o2. I'm sure they could easily crack the few shortcomings associated with them.

 

[Atlee]

Yes

Yea, the F250 diesel definitely has a huge weight penalty.

 

[Pelican]

1 ? 2 Ford - why not build the super duty in the USA where the majority of the trucks are sold?

When this thing hits the market, i just may sell the house, buy this truck, an RV and live at the various RV parks spinkled throught the FL Keys. Fresh seafood for dinner every night sounds like heaven on earth to me.

 

[Rod507]

1 ? 2 Ford - why not build the super duty in the USA where the majority of the trucks are sold?

When this thing hits the market, i just may sell the house, buy this truck, an RV and live at the various RV parks spinkled throught the FL Keys. Fresh seafood for dinner every night sounds like heaven on earth to me.

Watch Ford start their new line of RVs suitable for their hybrid trucks… made in NOT the US! ????

 

[amschind]

The problem with modern diesels is the emissions nonsense that still isn't settled. At 80k miles the EGR system needs torn down and cleaned. Diesels are best suited for being run hard -- I don't see, at this point in time at least, that OEMs have built them to a point where they're suitable for grocery getter applications. They should really put some $ into creating HHO cells for hydrogen injection to keep them clean. It's amazing what a little bit of hydrogen can do for diesels in both emissions and soot. HHO alone could allow for EGR delete as NOX emissions vanish.

The downside of course is that an HHO generator creates a perfect mix of explosive gas. There are cell designs that capture hydrogen only while venting the o2. I'm sure they could easily crack the few shortcomings associated with them.

Look I completely agree. I kind of divide automotive tech into three categories: What we could have RIGHT NOW from a grab bag of stuff that is currently in production vehicles, What we could have in the NEAR FUTURE from a grab bag of tech that is still in the early production/military only or prototype stage and What we could have in the future from tech that appears like it will work but is still in the academic or lab scale.

My interest in diesel parallel hybrids comes from the fact that its in category 1. Diesel fuel is naturally dirty, and users must either tolerate soot or add emissions equipment that makes them unreliable; neither is a great solution for mass adoption. I have very high hopes for an opposed piston gas engine with multiple bottoming cycles driving a generator in a series hybrid. Sometimes it appears that the automobile industry is leap frogging to this with the ACE from Cummins, the General Dynamics Abrams X and the Ram Charger REV, and other times it looks like we're stuck with conventional ICEs and parallel hybrids for a while longer. My hope is that the PB lasts until I can get a 3/4-1ton truck in this category.

Finally, I think that molten carbonate/solid oxide hybrid direct carbon fuel cells with some kind of heat bottoming cycle (ideally solid state TEGs, but that is a breakthrough away) would be amazing. I think that's 20 years away at least, but a 1 ton 4x4 truck that gets 60 MPG is possible and solves a lot of problems all at once.

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