When You Think It's Broken ...

I have had my new truck, Newt, for about a month now. Boy, do I love her. She is everything that I hoped she'd be. She's not as hard to park as I thought, and her low end torque, what helps get her moving, especially with a trailer, is a whopping, 935 lb-ft of torque. That means when we're stopped at a light, I can actually go forward without mashing the gas and barking the tires.

Newt's dash is a literal computer. It reports all kinds of information. It knows when my trailer is hitched up and offers me all kinds of data. I have a DEF gauge, DEF is the additive that all diesel engines require, but I haven't needed to add any yet. The screen that I finally landed on for daily driving is the one that shows hours running, miles to empty, average fuel mileage, and miles driven.

The 568 miles to empty quickly readjusted.

When the dealership delivered Newt, the fuel needle registered full, but I knew they had driven at least 120 miles. I headed over to the gas station and topped off the tank. It took 13 gallons of diesel. I reset the Trip 1 data to what you see in the above photo, and then I drove it. For ten days. All of the Trip 1 data changed except for the miles to E. It stubbornly sat at 568 miles to empty. The fuel gauge never wavered. It too sat firmly at full.

Big sigh. Newt's fuel gauge was obviously broken. I have a 100,000 mile warranty on her, so I put in a call to the service department here in town and made an appointment for the following Tuesday. The very next day, a Friday, I started Newt up and saw the fuel needle drop a tiny bit. The next day, it dropped down to three-quarters full.

We're a Ford truck family; husband's Raptor on the left, Newt on the right.

That weekend, I pulled out the owner's manual and started looking at some of Newt's specs. When I saw the size of the fuel tank, I almost had a heart attack. Newt lugs around a massive 48 gallon tank. I started doing some calculations based on the computer's miles per gallon average and realized that Newt has a range of about 700 miles! No wonder the needle hadn't moved. I cancelled the service appointment. 

I've driven 267 miles with 512 to go.

Once I realized how big the tank was, I filled it up again, and reset the trip data. This time, the miles to empty came in at close to 700 miles. Things were working just fine. In fact things were better than fine. I realized that I would never again have to fill up while driving to or from a show. I drive about 300 miles a week which means I am only going to need to get diesel about twice a month.

I was a little embarrassed about the whole Newt is Already Broken thing, but since then, I've been reading my truck's manual. Like they say, read the directions first!