‘Gone through every process’: Ford’s pledge after recall, stop-sales plagued early F-150

The Ford F-150 launched in Australia in late 2023 after undergoing a left- to right-hand drive conversion process in Melbourne, completed through Ford’s Thai-based partner RMA.

It didn’t take long for issues to start appearing, with both local and global issues resulting in a dozen recalls or stop-sales impacting the pickup, stifling any momentum it had and putting Ford’s plans to become a local leader in the market on hold.

This was headlined by a near three-month stop-sale which stretched from July to October last year, with deliveries resuming just a handful of months before the newly updated F-150 arrived.

Now on sale across Ford’s local dealerships, the facelifted F-150 gives the pickup a second chance at taking on the likes of the Ram 1500, Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Toyota Tundra – and Ford is making sure it’s crossed its t’s and dotted its i’s.

“We’ve gone through every process, and really gone into minute detail to protect our customers,” said Ford’s International Markets Group (IMG) program director, Iain Jones.

“Obviously some of those issues have also come from a left-hand drive vehicle – it’s no secret there’s been issues in the US as well.

“All of those products [under the stop-sale] were in our control, and so we’re not releasing that to our customers until we’ve got everything from both the US side and our side here addressed.

“We’ve tuned processes, we’ve tuned quality gates in the process, and sign-off criteria and gone through every process.”

When asked if there would be any lingering trust issues from potential customers following the plagued roll-out of the pre-update F-150, Jones said Ford’s decision to implement the extended stop-sale in the second half of 2025 shows it has its owners in mind.

“We deliberately stopped it to protect our customers, and so when we found out there were issues, we stopped the vehicle and stopped the production of that vehicle,” Jones added.

“To me, that’s equally the trust. We made the tough call and stopped and we spent a long time going through this truck on the remanufacturing process to validate everything, and get it back to what our customers expect from our quality.”