Well, Throttle My Body!

I have owned a bunch of automobiles, too many to count, really. All but my current ride, from the 1961 Oldsmobile Delta 88 to the penultimate 1999 Ford Ranger, were manufactured in the 20th Century. In 2015 I bought a two-years-old Ford F-150, my first, and thus far, only vehicle manufactured in the 21st century.

I love my pickup truck. But it has a little problem: it consumes throttle bodies. I have just installed my seventh throttle body on a truck that I have owned for a mere seven years.

Now a throttle body is not exactly a complicated piece of engineering. Back in the Dark and Dismal Days of my Youth, the throttle body (a flat, circular butterfly valve) was built into the carburetor and connected to the gas pedal by a mechanical linkage. When you pressed the gas pedal, the butterfly valve opened, allowing more air into the carburetor. Nowadays, with carburetors a thing of the past and fuel injection all the rage, the same little butterfly valve is located between the air filter and the intake manifold, and of course, it is no longer controlled by a mechanical linkage. No, in our wisdom, we have made this another electronic device, and it communicates vital information (via an air flow sensor and the throttle position sensor) to the automobile's computer.

You can see the problem: when the linkage was mechanical, all was right with the world. But now that the bloody thing is electronic and in contact with a computer, we have no end of troubles. So it is that, prior to my first throttle body replacement in 2015, I had never heard of a throttle body. Now it is the center of my fixation.

I once wrote a letter to Ford Motor Company's vice president of vehicle component and system engineering. I include a portion of that letter below. The letter was written in September of 2019.

"In the spring of 2015, when I bought my 2013 Ford F-150, I had never heard of a throttle body. A couple of weeks ago the Ford dealer in Asheville, NC, installed the fifth throttle body my truck has had since I purchased it. I strongly suspect that the previous owners, who purchased the vehicle new, traded it in for the same problem."

"Apparently this problem is not unique to my F-150. I say that because, back in the spring of 2016, I had to wait for two or three weeks to get my third throttle body installed. There was a nationwide shortage, which I assume meant that other F-150 owners were sharing in my woe."

"I thought the fourth throttle body, installed in the fall of 2016, was the lucky one. After all, I had never made it past six months with the others. Three years was a record. But, alas, three years was its life span."

"I know that Ford Motor Company has a stable of top-notch engineers in its employ. You don’t have the bestselling pickup truck for 40 years running without excellent engineering. Somewhere in your organization is a very bright engineer who knows the story behind these faulty throttle bodies. Better, he knows exactly what I need to do to make a throttle body last."

"Please, find that engineer, and have him contact the service department of Athens Ford in Athens, Georgia. Please have him tell the excellent mechanics there just what they need to do in order to fix my throttle body problem for once and for all."

The vice president had his minion contact me by telephone. He wanted me to take the F-150 to a dealership so they could read the part number for him. I took a photo of the part number, instead, and texted it to him. He assured me I had the latest and greatest all-problems-solved throttle body in place.

That was two throttle bodies ago.

Monday I saw the first symptom that my throttle body was dying: a wrench appeared on my computer display. The F-150 has two different signals indicating something is wrong. The first is the "check engine light" which, when lit, means "you're in trouble." The second is a wrench that appears on the computer display. That one means "you're in deep trouble." So the wrench appeared, along with a loss of acceleration. I drifted over into a parking lot and turned her off. She restarted, and as always with the throttle body problem, she allowed me to get home, but the wrench and the loss of acceleration are warning signs that you are living on borrowed time. Keep driving, and you will eventually be stranded.

Perhaps Asheville is like every other city: everyone is short of workers. The Ford dealership couldn't take me until mid-September. I tried other garages, and the earliest I could get in was the Tuesday after a weekend festival, two weeks away. I need the truck to haul a trailer to that festival, so that was no good. I had no choice but to fix it myself.

My son suggested I order the part from Amazon, which I did. I ordered it Wednesday, and it was here Thursday. It was 50% of the price the last Ford dealership charged me for that part. I watched a 6:49 YouTube video, "Suki's Shop," which showed me how to change the throttle body. Suki did the whole job in about seven minutes. It took me 57 minutes, but I'm not complaining.

Two thoughts occur to me. I have always used Ford replacement parts, as the job has always been performed in a Ford dealership. I just installed a third-party part. Maybe these third-party parts don't have the Ford defect in them that makes them fail frequently. Second, if this one does fail in another six months to a year, maybe I should just buy a spare throttle body and keep it in the toolbox of the F-150. I'll bet I could replace the next one in less than 57 minutes.