This is the result of a multifaceted problem.
1. Warranty work pays half (or less) what normal rates are.
2. Dealers do not always have capable staff (partly because of problem number 1)
3. Ram / STAR support is lackluster and not fully dependable. It all comes down to which person your tech “gets” when they reach out to technical assistance.
4. The corporate push is to get vehicles back out of the service bay and back to the customer so that they can “close out” trouble tickets and get the vehicle back to the owner before the lemon law out-of-service time can apply. And even then, they now have special protections due to “COVID supply chain issues” and what’s considered “reasonable” time out of service (or time waiting for parts)
I've met the mechanic working on the truck. He seems to be a straight shooter. A couple of comments from him. One, he despises the '19 on trucks. He claims the software is way too sensitive to sensor inputs. I tend to believe this one when even the wrong air filter might cause an issue. He thinks the DPF itself is an issue versus the one used earlier. Doesn't know whether the ceramic is finer possibly causing it to load up easier.
He says calling Star techs is almost worthless, in general they know less than the mechanics actually working on the vehicles.
The claim is they can plug in their scanner and it says everything is perfect. Drive the truck around and it says everything is perfect except the DPF starts loading up. This is hard to understand considering some members here obviously have large quantities of unburn fuel being dumped into oil. How can the tools provided to check this not see this fault? Fuel rail pressure might be off, certainly with the myriad of sensors it would show an extremely rich condition, leaky injector(s) should show up. Seems this isn't the case though.
I'm going to have to defend some of these mechanics. When they have no support from the manufacturer and the manufacturer provided tools say everything is perfect, along with traditional troubleshooting like checking compression, leaks, etc., what do you do?
Stellantis has a problem, I have zero doubt they know exactly what is causing it. Assuredly they have excellent records of changes from year to year. Something changed in '22 and it seems it may have been fixed in '23. Simple solution, either do to the '22's what they did prior or what they did with the '23's after which seem to have much less trouble with this.
I went down this road with my old telecom company. The manufacturer would make changes that affected an entire product line and when we'd call in with an issue the response was almost always, "We never heard of that". Right you idiots, it ultimately affects the majority of the systems. I'm sure some of you electronics guys remember the great capacitor fiasco. As dealers we took a huge financial hit dealing with manufacturer issues they claimed they never heard of.
I have a bad feeling Stellantis might be doing the same.
