I'll tell you who. Me. I want antiquated technology.

I'm 120 miles from my nearest ag dealership. I'm 80 miles from the nearest Ford dealership. And neither dealer is equipped to deal with complicated electronics problems that are manifest on autos and ag equipment today. The Ford dealership simply puts your truck onto a flatbed and hauls it to Salt Lake City, five hours away. A local tri-county weed district has a F-550 that they've sent back to SLC for electronics issues with the 6.0L five times. Finally, they're suing Ford and Ford is going to replace the truck completely. I'm told that they will stipulate that Ford may not put a 6.0L Powerstroke into the new truck for an engine, otherwise, they have to buy a competitive truck to settle the suit. All this is due to electrical problems in the engine/tranny assembly.

Complication in ag machines (your pickup included) might be acceptable in places where you can call the dealership and have a dealer mechanic/tech appear on your place that same day, but that's not here. There's only one guy who is available to fix everything on this farm and that is me. If I have to call someone in, then the machine is going to be down for days, perhaps weeks. That's not acceptable.

My beef with all these gee-whiz electronics and electrical assemblies on autos and ag equipment isn't merely mine. The JD Powers auto satisfaction survey shows very clearly the dissatisfaction of German auto customers (BMW's, MBZ, Audi, et al -- people paying up to $100K for a car!) with their cars' reliability in the last five years. The reason is collectively identified as "the fancy electronics are putting the cars into the shop for days on end while the car has less than 50K miles on it."

Being that I used to be a EE, I can tell you why this is happening: manufactures are using cheap electronics, cheap connectors, poor wiring and wiring practices and this results in failures, both premature and ongoing. Unless and until a manufacture uses mil-spec electronics, connectors and wiring, I want less, not more, of this stuff, because I know that it will fail and it will waste incredible amounts of my time to fix things that should never have been put onto a vehicle or machine in the first place. I'm not a luddite around electronics, since I spent 20+ years designing, implementing and selling increasingly complicated systems as products.

I am, however, as a result of this experience, someone who knows the difference between electrical/electronics done correctly and done poorly and ALL of the electrical/electronic stuff in modern trucks/machines is done poorly. In Ford's case with the 6.0L, the electronics/electrical stuff is done very poorly, in both hardware and software.