2020 FORD F-150 — Complaint #1850188
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about VISIBILITY:WINDSHIELD WIPER/WASHER:MOTOR filed October 27, 2022
NHTSA complaint #1850188 (ODI reference 11491113) concerns a 2020 FORD F-150 and was filed on October 27, 2022. The owner reports the failure occurred on October 26, 2022. The report was geocoded to Ohio based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as visibility:windshield wiper/washer:motor, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.
The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: no, fire: no, injuries: 0, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.
Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same FORD F-150 cohort independently describe similar visibility:windshield wiper/washer:motor failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 2020 FORD F-150 shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
Windshield wiper motors failed during a rain storm. Vehicle has only 10k miles on it, wiper motors were set to medium, went up half way, motor made a grinding noise, then wipers stopped moving in either direction. I am able to push them down manually, and the motor can raise them to about 25% then it begins to grind and they stop advancing again. This stinks an awful lot like the recall on 2021 F-150s for bad wiper motors. I suspect the recall campaign needs to be MUCH larger and include 2020 F-150s as well. This was incredibly dangerous and could have caused a serious accident. I had no front visibility during the storm.
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1850188 |
| ODI Number | 11491113 |
| Date Filed | October 27, 2022 |
| Failure Date | October 26, 2022 |
| VIN | 1FTFW1E44LK |
Similar VISIBILITY:WINDSHIELD WIPER/WASHER:MOTOR Complaints for 2020 FORD F-150
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.