I have had a superchip in my last F-150 and then moved it to my current F-150 with no problems. However the other day a good friend of mine that works at the local Ford dealership told me that they have had to replace alot of transmissions and rear ends due to people installing chips in there vehicles and the owner has to pay for the repairs. He stated names like (Hypertech and Jet). My current truck has a really good shift from 1st to 2nd (Gives a nice hard shift at almost WOT, you can hear the plastic shift in the cab when it shifts) and good quick shift thru the rest of the gears, here are my questions.

1. Has anyone had any problems develop due to having a Superchip installed?

2. Kicking down will sometime cause the truck to kick down to the lower gear and then back into another higher gear like the first gear was to low and it decided to go to the next gear. This cause two very hard jolts to the drivetrian that you can feel throughout the truck. Is that normal?

I overall love my chip and want to keep it in the truck but don't want to break anything.

 

Hi CodeBlue,

This is a common question that comes up from time to time, and you can rest easy, that Superchip is *not* going to harm your transmission, as you can see from haivng used it in a couple of F-150's with no problems.

In fact, any skilled transmission specialist would say what the Superchip does for the F-150's automatic transmission is generally *good* for the transmission, as what the Superchip does first and foremost is to reduce *slippage*.

Making the transmission shift quicker and firmer is good for it when done with skill & reason, the reality is that actually *increases* the service life of the primary friction materials, the bands & clutches in side any automatic transmission, thanks to less slippage reducing the amount of heat generated. Heat is the #1 enemy of any automatic transmission, so the basic tendency is to see *better* automatic transmission service life with the Superchip.

Now, if you have someone who has bolted on a supercharger and is running it at the drag strip (especially with slicks!), that can indeed shorten automatic transmission life, sure! Or, take someone who has done every bolt-on mod known to man and drives it like a race car on the street, sure, I'd say you're going to see some increased incidences of failure of any number of components from doing things like that. Abuse *anything* and it will break quicker.

But you'll notice *you* have not had any problems with either of your F-150's using the Superchip, nor do we see any incidence of increased tranny failure among those who use Superchips here on F-150 Online in their F-150's and post on these message boards, so what does *that* tell you?

Though we're not fans of Hypertech or Jet, they generally do not have a tendency towards automatic transmission damage either.

I'd go so far as to say that mechanics probably do tend to see more failures in vehicles that have more modifications, and in our experience that is from a combination of the choices of actual parts used and how the vehicle is operated and maintained. We've seen a lot of bad combinations ourselves, being used by people who don't really know what to use or who refuse to listen, or who insist on buying cheap parts to get a bargain, etc., you name it, we've seen it, and I'm sure your mechanic friend has too!

For example, in automatic transmissions alone, almost *nobody* who abuses their F-150 at the drag strip, or who drives it aggressively on the street, or who tows heavy loads ever bothers to put on a transmission fluid temperature gauge and an additional thermostatically controlled tranny fluid cooler w/fan as is required to protect the transmission. Many people just start bolting on parts & driving them like race cars and have no idea that they're sending tranny fluid temps north of 300 degrees in many situations, a sure tranny killer!

Don't forget, these Ford automatic transmissions, both 4R70W and 4R100, can and do fail whether the vehicle is bone stock and gets driven like a baby or whether it's towing huge loads or whether it's being drag raced. We've seen one F-150 burn up 6 (six) 4R100's in a row in less than 6000 miles in a bone-stock brand new F-150, and then on the other side of that coin, we've also seen the smaller 4R70W's stand up to supercharging & racing at the drag strip, etc. for many miles with never a hint of trouble, and literally everything in between those 2 extremes.

Your friend is, I'm sure, a very nice guy and a talented mechanic, telling you what he *thinks*, but he cannot tell you that those parts actually *caused* those problems. How could he possibly separate all the automatic transmission failures that happen on bone-stock vehicles from those that fail on modified vehicles to determine the actual cause? They don't get torn down at the dealership in the vast majority of cases, they are sent back intact to Ford because Ford wants to do the teardown to see what damage occurred first hand, and so the dealership usually just bolts in a new replacement transmission in most cases, rebuilds aren't done nearly as often at the dealership level these days as they used to be years ago. If your friend ever had a chance to speak to the Plant Manager of Ford's Livonia transmission plant for any length of time, he'd quickly find out just how poorly some of those transmissions are built and rebuilt supplied by Ford! It drives those poor guys at Livonia crazy, and it's due in large part to the various cost-cutting measures Ford implemented under Jac Nasser (though we can't blame poor ol' Jac for everything), that have reduced quality. They are now working extremely hard on that very issue, high failure rates in automatic transmissions, among other issues concerning quality, as they should be.

We've got F-150's ranging from very lightly modified (Superchip, intake, electric fans, etc.) to very heavily modified (well over 500 hp Lightning), and we have not yet had a single failure of any automatic transmission or rear end in any of our modified F-150's, all of which wear at least a Superchip. Personally, we feel it's a matter of how we actually operate and maintain our vehicles combined with using only excellent quality parts designed for a specific purpose and not driving the vehicles like we hate them.

All in all, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this, but if you'd like to go over this in more detail, feel free to give us a call.

Have fun!