Ask TFL: Ford F-350 Recall Decreased My Truck’s Payload By 487 Pounds! Why Is That?

2020 Ford F-250 7.3L gas V8 towing MPG loop
image: TFLtruck

This question comes to us from Rudy, an owner of a 2020 Ford Super Duty F-350 truck. His relatively new heavy-duty truck was recently called in for a recall that decreased his truck’s payload by 487 lbs. What is going on here? Rudy is a very unhappy truck owner.

Here is what Rudy has to say:

My name is Rudy. I am a long-time viewer and fan. Recently I had a recall on my 2020 Ford F-350 long bed crew cab. As you can see my payload dropped almost 500 lbs because of this recall. In my opinion that is false advertising and “bait and switch”. How can Ford change the payload of my truck after it’s been sold? My truck has a GVWR of 12,400 lbs and this just doesn’t make sense. I weighed my truck empty with me and my son and it came in at around 8,100 lbs. The truck must weigh around 7900 lbs or so. 7900 + 4,068 (my “new” payload) doesn’t equal 12,400 lbs like it’s supposed to. Something is wrong here.

Here are some images that Rudy sent in.

Also, here is another description of this recall from NHTSA. It states that 9,979 trucks were affected by this payload sticker error.

ford f-350 recall

We do not have a good explanation about exactly what happened here, or what caused the payload stickers to be printed wrong for these trucks in the first place. This is a very strange recall indeed.