What are you doing this very moment? Have you looked at your lug nuts lately? Have you REALLY looked at them? Tried to take one off?

When you have a flat tire is NOT the time to learn that Ford is knowingly putting subpar lug nuts on your vehicle. You want to swap out your lug nuts ASAP with a lug nut that you can dependably remove in an emergency.

To elaborate -- Ford uses a multi-layered design to save money when manufacturing the lug nut. It's a dull metal nut surrounded by a thin, shiny, chrome shroud. Think of it as a veneer. But instead of bonding that veneer to the surface of the lug nut, there's a pocket of air between there.

After a few years of regular tire rotations, you find that the outer coating starts to dent, deform, and swell. Eventually, it's impossible to remove the lug with a nominal wrench.

Go buy yourself two things: (1) a nice shiny set of lug nuts (Thread is M12x1.5). You'll need twenty (20) nuts total among all four (4) wheels. (2) a tool called a lug nut flip socket. It's sized 0.5mm larger than your standard socket to fit over the swollen nuts.

What are you waiting for? Go swap these now!

Total cost for repair at home was $50, including the nuts, the tool, and shipping.

Returning from Church this date (5/22/2022) we got a low tire warning. We were on Hwy 168 between Littlefield Road and Cressmans Road. Pulled into the first turn out to see what was the issue. Right front tire was audibly leaking and very low. Pulled out the spare and equipment and the Ford provided lug wrench would not fit the lug nuts. Attempted various size sockets from my personal tool box as well as a star wrench provided by my next door neighbor that happened to be passing by, no good!

Due to location there was zero cell service. Had to walk to Cressmans store to use their phone and call AAA for road side service. Waited about 50 minutes for tow truck and their sockets would not fit either. Had the vehicle towed to Fresno to my mechanic's shop. Total time to resolve the issue was 3 hours just to get home, and the car still had to make it to Fresno. The costs to repair are unknown currently as mechanic shop is closed. If the lug nuts had been all steel and the Ford provided spare tools fit, I would have had the car back on the road in less than 20 minutes. Tow truck driver advised that he had a similar issue last week. They were able to use a hammer to drive the Ford provided lug wrench on to the lug nuts to get them off, however they were only able to get 3 of lug nuts tightened enough so the vehicle driver felt safe to slow drive to Auberry and have a local shop work on the vehicle.

Ford needs to implement a recall on these lug nuts as they are inferior in construction to what has been used on almost every other car on the road today.

This problem must have been reported before, because I understand that there has been a class-action lawsuit against Ford about this. The problem is that the chrome cap on the lug nuts pulls away from the underlying nut, water and whatnot gets in, and the chrome swells at the bottom of the nut. Once this happens, the lug wrench that comes with the vehicle no longer fits the nuts, meaning that you can't take the tire off yourself. I took it to our tire guys and they were able to remove the tire (which was flat after picking up a nail) and replace it. However, I still don't have the tools to do that.

There seem to be two solutions:

1. Buy new lug nuts, preferably ones that don't have a chrome cap. I still need someone with the right tools to remove the old swollen ones so that the new ones can be installed.

2. Buy a slightly-larger lug wrench that will fit over the swollen nuts (not even sure those are available).

I called the Ford dealer that's done 99% of the service on our vehicle and their position is that this is wear-and-tear on the lug nuts and so the problem is not covered under warranty.