Goldeneye36
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I finally got to take my first long road trip with the new truck over the past few days and really stretch its legs. Quick summary: 2024 XLT PowerBoost, South FL to Western NC: ~10.5 hours total each way. The trip up was split into 2 days (8hrs/2.5hrs) and the trip back was done straight though. Did some driving around where we were staying as well.
TLDR: the truck did awesome and my transmission seems to have gotten smoother?
I could write a bigger book about this trip, which wasn't anything special really aside from putting 1400 miles on the truck in short order. I was a bit anxious going into this as the truck hit 5000 miles right before we left and I wanted to do my 1st oil change beforehand, but we are in the process of moving out of our house and have been insanely busy so I didn't have time and just sent it on the factory oil, lol. Technically, at the start of the trip the truck had about 1500 electric miles so only about 3500 on the engine
.
Spoiler alert: The truck chugged along both ways with no complaints and everything went fine, which in hindsight isn't surprising as all my F150s have been great on road trips but spending too much time on forums and Reddit can make you hyper aware of every little possible thing that could go wrong I guess. The only scary moment was when I ran over a chunk of concrete in the road that I didn't see and after hearing what sounded like a sledgehammer hitting the bottom of the truck I was staring at the transmission temps waiting to see if the plastic pan had been cracked. Thankfully all was well there and a quick visual check underneath at the hotel didn't reveal any obvious damage.
I was going to extrapolate on how well the ACC and lane centering worked (95% of the time anyway) as well as my new Leer folding tonneau cover (no water in the bed despite multiple torrential downpours while driving) but that would drag out this thread way longer than needed so I'll leave it at that for those topics.
The main reason I'm even writing this thread about what is a relatively boring trip, compared to what many of you get up to, are my observations about the infamous 10R80 we all know and love. I'm among the group of people who have been experiencing a rumbling noise/vibration in high gear, high load, and low RPM situations. To recap: if you are doing roughly 50-70mph in 10th gear with the RPMs at or under 2k and you give it a little gas (say, to maintain speed on a small hill without downshifting) you will experience something very similar to driving over the rumble strips commonly found in the shoulder of most roads. I mentioned in multiple threads here that I was experiencing this on my new truck and it seemed to improve after ~1500 miles. It has indeed lessened in intensity since the truck was new but as time has gone on, it has become more reproduceable. I've since gotten into the habit of mitigating the noise/vibration by locking out 10th gear as I approach the overpasses that make up the only hills where I live in South FL.
Long story short, for this trip I spent a large portion of the drive from FL to NC with 10th, and occasionally 9th and even 8th locked out in an effort to reduce the rumble strip effect since it would happen at basically every hill I encountered. During the few days we stayed in NC we did some driving in the local area as well as ~45min into Asheville one day and I can say the PowerBoost loved the hills and returned some very good MPGs compared to the flat roads in FL. Because of the hilly terrain, I played around with locking out gears and using Manual mode in a few of the steeper locations and also observed how the PowerBoost handled some of the steeper areas. I was surprised to see the regen braking increase significantly on some downhill stretches without any extra brake pedal input. Also, on the steep hill where our cabin was located, I would lock the transmission into 1st and the truck would roll down this hill with the RPMs basically at idle while regen braking would hold speed until a certain point then the transmission would engage the engine and the RPMs would climb rapidly to almost 3k while the truck accelerated down the hill. It appears the regenerative braking can vary quite a lot in these trucks in hilly terrain to minimize the need to manual shifting and friction braking. As a note, I was in Normal mode for everything described in this post - I didn't use any other drive modes during this trip except for Sport occasionally when merging onto highways.
During our time in the mountains and doing all the hilly driving I noticed the transmission seemed to be smoothing out and I wasn't experiencing the rumble strip effect nearly as much on the hills as I had previously. On the 10.5hr drive back to FL today I tested my suspicions by leaving the transmission alone and only rarely locking out 10th and intentionally riding the high gears into the hills. I had very little noise/vibration in the high gears compared to the drive up and the transmission seemed more eager to downshift now on the uphill portions. It appears that driving in hilly terrain and locking out gears/using manual mode has forced the transmission into a smoother operation somehow, whether that be an adaptive table thing and/or a physical break-in thing, the truck is driving the smoothest it ever has.
I now have 6400 miles on the truck and will be changing the oil tomorrow, lol. I wish I had a bunch of pictures to attach, but I'm not a prolific picture-taker and I was busy driving the whole time so unfortunately I didn't take any awesome pics of the truck in the Appalachian Mountains. All I have are some pics from our hike up to Looking Glass Rock so that will have to do.
TLDR: the truck did awesome and my transmission seems to have gotten smoother?
I could write a bigger book about this trip, which wasn't anything special really aside from putting 1400 miles on the truck in short order. I was a bit anxious going into this as the truck hit 5000 miles right before we left and I wanted to do my 1st oil change beforehand, but we are in the process of moving out of our house and have been insanely busy so I didn't have time and just sent it on the factory oil, lol. Technically, at the start of the trip the truck had about 1500 electric miles so only about 3500 on the engine
.Spoiler alert: The truck chugged along both ways with no complaints and everything went fine, which in hindsight isn't surprising as all my F150s have been great on road trips but spending too much time on forums and Reddit can make you hyper aware of every little possible thing that could go wrong I guess. The only scary moment was when I ran over a chunk of concrete in the road that I didn't see and after hearing what sounded like a sledgehammer hitting the bottom of the truck I was staring at the transmission temps waiting to see if the plastic pan had been cracked. Thankfully all was well there and a quick visual check underneath at the hotel didn't reveal any obvious damage.
I was going to extrapolate on how well the ACC and lane centering worked (95% of the time anyway) as well as my new Leer folding tonneau cover (no water in the bed despite multiple torrential downpours while driving) but that would drag out this thread way longer than needed so I'll leave it at that for those topics.
The main reason I'm even writing this thread about what is a relatively boring trip, compared to what many of you get up to, are my observations about the infamous 10R80 we all know and love. I'm among the group of people who have been experiencing a rumbling noise/vibration in high gear, high load, and low RPM situations. To recap: if you are doing roughly 50-70mph in 10th gear with the RPMs at or under 2k and you give it a little gas (say, to maintain speed on a small hill without downshifting) you will experience something very similar to driving over the rumble strips commonly found in the shoulder of most roads. I mentioned in multiple threads here that I was experiencing this on my new truck and it seemed to improve after ~1500 miles. It has indeed lessened in intensity since the truck was new but as time has gone on, it has become more reproduceable. I've since gotten into the habit of mitigating the noise/vibration by locking out 10th gear as I approach the overpasses that make up the only hills where I live in South FL.
Long story short, for this trip I spent a large portion of the drive from FL to NC with 10th, and occasionally 9th and even 8th locked out in an effort to reduce the rumble strip effect since it would happen at basically every hill I encountered. During the few days we stayed in NC we did some driving in the local area as well as ~45min into Asheville one day and I can say the PowerBoost loved the hills and returned some very good MPGs compared to the flat roads in FL. Because of the hilly terrain, I played around with locking out gears and using Manual mode in a few of the steeper locations and also observed how the PowerBoost handled some of the steeper areas. I was surprised to see the regen braking increase significantly on some downhill stretches without any extra brake pedal input. Also, on the steep hill where our cabin was located, I would lock the transmission into 1st and the truck would roll down this hill with the RPMs basically at idle while regen braking would hold speed until a certain point then the transmission would engage the engine and the RPMs would climb rapidly to almost 3k while the truck accelerated down the hill. It appears the regenerative braking can vary quite a lot in these trucks in hilly terrain to minimize the need to manual shifting and friction braking. As a note, I was in Normal mode for everything described in this post - I didn't use any other drive modes during this trip except for Sport occasionally when merging onto highways.
During our time in the mountains and doing all the hilly driving I noticed the transmission seemed to be smoothing out and I wasn't experiencing the rumble strip effect nearly as much on the hills as I had previously. On the 10.5hr drive back to FL today I tested my suspicions by leaving the transmission alone and only rarely locking out 10th and intentionally riding the high gears into the hills. I had very little noise/vibration in the high gears compared to the drive up and the transmission seemed more eager to downshift now on the uphill portions. It appears that driving in hilly terrain and locking out gears/using manual mode has forced the transmission into a smoother operation somehow, whether that be an adaptive table thing and/or a physical break-in thing, the truck is driving the smoothest it ever has.
I now have 6400 miles on the truck and will be changing the oil tomorrow, lol. I wish I had a bunch of pictures to attach, but I'm not a prolific picture-taker and I was busy driving the whole time so unfortunately I didn't take any awesome pics of the truck in the Appalachian Mountains. All I have are some pics from our hike up to Looking Glass Rock so that will have to do.
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The only comment I have is that I would have change the oil at 2k miles once I got past the 1k mile break-in period. I know you said you were busy before your trip. I know people have strong opinions about when to change oil in an engine. I do my oil changes between 3-4k miles. So many MFG engine issue reported lately. Keeping fresh oil in the engine is much cheaper than replacing engine IMO. Good luck with your truck..
