Ford F-150

The aluminum truck

In 2015 Ford did something nobody in the full-size truck business had the nerve to do: it swapped the F-150's steel body for aluminum alloy. The frame stayed steel. Everything you can touch from outside — hood, doors, fenders, box — went to aluminum, and the truck lost several hundred pounds in the process. That is the whole reason this generation exists, and it is why a 13th-gen F-150 drives lighter, tows more for the engine it has, and behaves differently at the body shop than the truck it replaced.

Six model years, 2015 through 2020. Chassis code P552. It is the best-selling vehicle in America for most of that span, which means there are millions of them on the road and the odds are good that whatever is wrong with yours has been wrong with a hundred thousand others.

It is also, from a parts point of view, one of the trickiest trucks we cover. Seven engine names and ten actual engines. Two transmissions that overlap for four model years. Seven series, three cab styles, three box lengths, and a page of option packages that change the axle, the springs, the shocks and the transfer case. Getting a part right on this truck means knowing what you have, not what year it is.

The one thing everybody gets wrong

The 10-speed did not replace the 6-speed in 2017. It joined it.

You will read, in a lot of places, that the 2015–2016 trucks are six-speeds and the 2017-and-up trucks are ten-speeds. That is wrong for three of the five engines a 2017 owner could have bought, and it stays wrong for the base V6 all the way through 2020.

Here is what Ford's own documents say, year by year:

Three different regimes in six years. If you own a 2018, 2019 or 2020 F-150 with the base 3.3L V6, you have a six-speed — the same gearbox family a 2015 truck has. If you own a 2017 with the 5.0L V8, you also have a six-speed.

How to check yours in ten seconds: open the driver's door and find the box marked TR on the white Safety Compliance label. A 6 is the 6R80 six-speed. A G is the 10R80 ten-speed. Ford prints that table in the owner's manual for every year of this generation, and it is the only answer we would act on.

The engines, and when each one actually existed

Ford ran ten distinguishable engine builds across six model years. Seven nameplates, three of which changed enough mid-generation that they are not the same engine before and after.

• 3.5L Ti-VCT V6 (2015–2017) — the naturally aspirated base engine. Gone after 2017.
• 3.3L Ti-VCT V6 (2018–2020) — its replacement, and the only engine still on the six-speed.
• 2.7L EcoBoost — first generation 2015–2017, second generation 2018–2020. Ford named the generations itself; the 2018 engine added port injectors alongside the direct ones.
• 3.5L EcoBoost — first generation 2015–2016, second generation 2017–2020. Note that this one moved a year earlier than the facelift. Anyone treating 2018 as the single engine boundary is wrong about 2017.
• High-Output 3.5L EcoBoost (2017–2020) — Raptor-only until 2019, then Raptor and Limited. It is a different engine from the standard 3.5L EcoBoost, and it was never a standalone option box you could tick.
• 5.0L Ti-VCT V8 — 2015–2017 in one form, 2018–2020 in another. Ford never marketed a generation name for it, but its own documents record a change of injection system and a jump in compression ratio at 2018, so we treat them as two.
• 3.0L Power Stroke V6 turbo diesel (2018–2020) — the first diesel ever offered on an F-150. Watch out for this one: it did not launch with the 2018 model year, it started shipping to dealers in May 2018. An early-build 2018 truck was built before you could order one.

The engine is not printed on the door label. The underhood emissions label names the displacement, and the 8th character of your VIN is Ford's engine code. But we have not sourced Ford's code table for this generation from a Ford document, so we are not going to publish a decoder we cannot back up. Read the underhood label.

Cab, box and wheelbase

Not every cab pairs with every box. Six combinations were sold on a standard truck, and three plausible-sounding ones never existed: Regular Cab with the 5.5-foot box, SuperCab with the 5.5-foot box, and SuperCrew with the 8-foot box. Ford prints an em dash in those cells every year.

The Raptor is its own thing again — 4x4 only, always the 5.5-foot box, on wheelbases (134.2 in SuperCab, 146.0 in SuperCrew) that appear nowhere else in the generation.

Two of those rows share a wheelbase, so wheelbase alone will not tell you what you have. Count the doors instead. Regular Cab has two and no back seat at all. SuperCab has four, but the back pair are short, hinged at the rear, and cannot open until the front door does. SuperCrew has four normal doors and real back-seat legroom. Then measure the box floor: 67.1 inches is the 5.5-foot box, 78.9 is the 6.5, and 97.6 is the 8-foot. Those gaps are a foot wide — a tape measure cannot get this wrong. (Yes, the boxes are named for a nominal length, not the one you measure.)

Nothing in this table changed between 2015 and 2020. The 2018 facelift moved the engine line-up, not the body matrix, and the Raptor's 2017 arrival is the only addition.

Packages that change what fits

A trim badge is not the whole story on this truck. Four packages in particular fork real hardware, and none of them shows on the fender:

• FX4 Off-Road (55A) — changes the rear axle ratio, adds an electronic locking rear differential, off-road-tuned shocks and three skid plates. One wrinkle worth knowing: Ford described front and rear off-road shocks for 2015–2016 and front shocks from 2017. Treat those as two different answers.
• Heavy-Duty Payload (627) — different wheels, different tires, upgraded springs, a taller rear axle ratio and a bigger gearset. Worth saying plainly, because it gets repeated wrong: in every Ford document we read, this package changes no brake component.
• Max. Trailer Tow (53C) — requires the 3.5L EcoBoost, and brings a locking rear axle, the extended-range fuel tank, an integrated trailer brake controller and an upgraded front stabilizer bar. It is 53C, not 53A. 53A is the ordinary Trailer Tow Package and 53B is a bare Class IV hitch, so "my truck came with a factory hitch" does not mean it has the tow package.
• Snow Plow Prep (68P) — 4x4 with the 5.0L V8 only, and on a Lariat it swaps the two-speed automatic transfer case for the shift-on-the-fly one. If you have a snowplow button on the dash, you have it.

They are all identified the same way: the block of three-character codes on the driver-door label, or the order sticker in the glove box.

What we do not know yet

We would rather tell you than pretend. Four honest gaps on this truck:

• The AXLE box on your door label. We can tell you where it is and we can give you Ford's own ordering codes for every ratio, but we could not find a Ford document that decodes the short string that box actually prints. Confirm your ratio from the window sticker or a dealer build sheet, not from a forum table.
• Equipment groups. The 100A / 301A / 502A codes are the real ordering axis inside each series and they gate which packages you could order. Enumerating them needs a Ford dealer order guide for all six years, and we only obtained four.
• The 2018 diesel's exact trim and body availability. Ford stated it clearly for 2019 and 2020. The 2018 brochure went to print before the engine launched, so it does not say.
• The Raptor's brakes. The Raptor is the obvious candidate for a brake difference and we found no Ford document that states one. We are not going to assume it. The only configuration in this generation for which Ford documents a different brake package is the fleet-only F-150 Police Responder.

And a few things that do not exist on this truck, so you can stop looking: there is no hybrid in this generation (that is the 2021-and-up truck), there was no factory Harley-Davidson F-150 (the 2019–2020 one was a converter's product sold through dealers, not a Ford trim), there is no "Payload Plus" package, and Ford's slide-in-camper package — code 471 — is a Super Duty option, not an F-150 one.