How do I turn this off? Last winter was our first winter season and first taste of off road capabilities with our fairly new to us 09 F150 crew XLT.

We are basically right on the Canadian border in northern MN and we drive these trucks out on frozen lakes for ice fishing. This truck seriously disappointed us in "ice road trucker" use, the traction control all but completely handicapped the truck, it was close to useless on off road snow driving, which is stuff we've been doing with ford trucks for better than 20 yrs now. The truck tries so hard to help out, it thinks it's so smart and so helpful but it's like trying to pilot a tap dancing horse through a mine field.... you be like "please stop tap dancing!" lol!

We tried canceling out the "traction control" on the dash board display, but it didn't seem to change the truck's spastic behavior. Is there a tuner I can buy that will allow me to disable things like trac control and anti lock brakes for off roading?

I'm seriously worried about an elk hunting trip coming up in Oct. We hunt public land in Colorado and we set up camp way back in no mans land on pretty terrible trails. It can be a real test of a truck's off road ability, I've had several fords in that rugged location in the past and they have all done well, but I'm really worried that this 09 is too "smart" for that set of rugged trails.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated, Thanks.

Dave

 

The manual will tell you how to disable it for low speeds. But I think no matter what it will still activate for higher speeds (I think its above 35 MPH?) to prevent loss of stability.

But I'm guessing you don't do high speed driving on these "rugged trails", right?
So if you follow the procedure in the manual you can disable it.

OR (and I advise against this unless you are only doing off-road driving) you can just pull the fuse for the module.

 

Thanks, I guess I'll unzip the manual and look for that.

And yes, on our elk trip we'll be in crawler mode, very low speed on the trails I'm concerned about. And on our ice fishing we are always under 20 mph.

Thanks very much.

 

If you press and release the button, you aren't turning the system completely off. If you press and hold the button, it will shut all the functions off until you get back to 35mph or higher:

 

that is awesome, thank you very much for posting that up!!

 

IF you READ carefully you will note that Traction Control remains Disabled for 35+ MPH if the button is held until the ADVANCETRAC OFF screen disappears (~10 seconds).
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