Here’s How Well This $111,000 Diesel Truck’s Interior Stood Up To A Rain Storm

Rain is something that most car owners never really have to worry about. Vehicles are pretty well shielded from the weather, and modern tires can provide shockingly good grip in the wet. Yet, I found a way to make rain terrifying. I lost the key fob to a brand-new $111,000 Ford F-350 Super Duty diesel pickup truck while on a road trip; this rendered the truck bricked on the side of a highway with its windows and sunroof open. What proceeded was a mix of stupid decisions and dumb fails, including walking an Interstate’s median at midnight and getting a U-Haul stuck only 100 feet away from the stuck Ford. After an intense nightmare had seemingly passed, things were looking great. Then, the rain came. In a desperate effort to protect the interior of this expensive truck, I basically had to sacrifice all of my clothes.

What you’re reading is the third and final part of my saga about the disaster that occurred after losing the key to a press truck. All I was trying to do was drive 773 miles from my home in Illinois to the Port of Baltimore to pick up a sweet 1997 Honda Life. Truth be told, the 2025 Ford F-350 Super Duty Platinum Plus that Ford loaned me for this trip is an epic truck and a fantastic road trip companion. Had I been sitting on $111,000 of spare cash, I would have just asked Ford if I could buy the whole truck that weekend.

I used that truck to retrieve one of the smallest cars, but I loved that giant beast even if it’s over-the-top. It has a fuel tank so huge, and its 6.7-liter High Output Power Stroke diesel gets fuel economy so good for a big pickup truck that you can go over 800 miles on a tank if you’re unloaded. It’s also a big truck so luxurious that I wouldn’t even pick a BMW over it. You bet I’m going to tell you all about it.

For now, I have one more cautionary tale of woe.

(Full Disclosure: Ford loaned me a 2025 F-350 Super Duty Platinum Plus for a little over a week to haul home my new-to-me 1997 Honda Life. Ford took such great care of me during this whole ordeal, and I cannot find the proper words to thank those lovely people enough.)

In Case You Missed It

In Part 1, I explained how I got myself into this situation in the first place. I managed to drive about 697 miles of my trip entirely without issue. The Platinum Plus made the trip fun, with little fatigue. I even wore the Stetson that my wife bought me, fully embracing how she would enjoy the big truck experience.

I stopped in Hagerstown, Maryland, barely over an hour from the port, for dinner at a pizza place I had never heard of. While eating on the tailgate, I had the perhaps irrational fear that the truck might accidentally lock itself with the fob inside, so I put the fob on the cowling in front of the windshield, expecting to remember it was there before taking off. But I didn’t, and the key flew off of the truck almost immediately after I entered I-70 E. I made it maybe about a mile before I pulled over and put the truck in park. Only then did I get a missing fob warning and it was followed by the truck shutting itself down and effectively bricking itself.

What proceeded was a bit of a nightmare, as I wrote in my recap:

I was so stuck on the side of I-70 that I ended up walking a mile down a highway median at night, nearly getting clobbered by hundreds of speeding and distracted motorists. I was initially saved by Maryland state troopers, only to be told to use an Uber to go back to the truck to retrieve my valuables. That Uber driver abandoned me at the truck. Desperate, I called Ford Roadside Assistance, which was powerless to help me. They couldn’t even get me a tow truck because the Super Duty was too big for the tow trucks operating that night. Then, it started raining, so I had to fashion a makeshift sunroof out of a blanket and floor mats. Then, I had to walk down the median one more time, and that time it was extra terrible because it was raining.

Finally, another Maryland state trooper picked me up, and we went on a short ride-along before he finally dropped me off at my hotel. I got into my room just after 2 a.m., or a little over four hours since the disaster began. It was hard to believe that only four hours had passed. It felt like I was fighting all night. If you want to read the full story, click here to read part one.

In Part 2, I noted that on the morning after, Friday, I was given three choices. I could have towed the truck to a dealer and paid the dealership for two new keys, I could have waited for Ford to overnight the original spare key to my hotel, or I could have waited roughly seven hours for Ford to send out a driver from Detroit with the truck’s second fob. The first option would have likely cost me $1,000 and had no guarantee of getting me back on the road in time to get to the port before it closed for the weekend. Option two would have also delayed me getting to the port until Monday. I didn’t like option three because I didn’t want to have someone drive a 14-hour round trip just because I screwed up.

Our secret designer, the Bishop, and I hatched a wild plan. What if I asked to have the key driven out, and then instead of just sitting around and waiting for seven hours, I just use a U-Haul to pick up my Honda? That way, I’d be ready to drive home the moment Ford’s courier brought me the key. I thought the idea was brilliant. I canceled the tow because I thought it wasn’t needed anymore. I’m still not sure why I thought that.

This didn’t go to plan. U-Haul didn’t have any pickup trucks available that morning and no car hauler trailers, either. So I rented a cube van and then attempted to transfer the trailer I had on the back of the F-350 to the U-Haul truck. I then got the U-Haul stuck in mud next to the Interstate while trying to position myself to do the trailer transfer.

Technically, I made another mistake here, as well. As a reader pointed out, I should have still gotten the truck towed. The tow would have been free, anyway. Following through on the tow would have removed the truck and trailer from being on the side of the highway. It would have also made facilitating the trailer transfer much safer as it would have happened in a Ford dealer parking lot rather on the side of a highway. Likewise, maybe the dealer could have put the truck under cover or something. So, add “canceling the tow” to my long list of dumb failures during this whole event.

Things finally began turning in the correct direction once a kind AAA tow truck driver winched the U-Haul out of the mud and helped me safely attach the trailer. I then drove to the port, picked the car up, and began driving back to Hagerstown. I figured the key would be there around the time I got there. So, I’d just have to hitch up, return the U-Haul, and head home. My purse would be a little lighter, but I would have gotten out of this ordeal with nothing truly bad happening.

Not Out Of The Storm Yet

I departed the Port of Baltimore with high spirits and, for the first time in 17 hours, a smile on my face. But it wasn’t meant to be.

As I drove into heavy Baltimore traffic, I noticed that there were dark clouds in the distance. I had checked the weather early that morning. The forecast called for heavy rain in the evening, but the timing placed the rain as arriving after I was scheduled to be on the road for home already. It was because of this reason that I didn’t buy a tarp to cover the F-350.

However, my weather app now suggested that the situation was rapidly changing. Now, the rain was scheduled to arrive in Hagerstown in maybe two hours. The trip to the port from where I got stuck took only an hour and 10 minutes. Based on time estimates, Ford’s driver should have been arriving at the truck at about the moment I was stuck in traffic. But I did not receive a text or call.

Thus, I moved to another backup plan. I would race to a Walmart in Hagerstown, get a tarp or something, cover the F-350, and then wait it out. In theory, I had just enough time to make this work.

In practice, traffic in Baltimore was brutal. I watched as my estimated travel time crept up minute by minute. A crash and construction slowed traffic down even more. When I finally got free of the Baltimore blockage, I was due to arrive at the truck at around the instant the rain was scheduled to arrive. I no longer had time to go to Walmart. Now, it was a race against time to do what I could to salvage the situation.

Driving the U-Haul fast was a scary thing. This “in-town” rental truck didn’t seem to be maintained that well. It had an illuminated check engine light when I picked it up and I had driven boats with more accurate steering. But that’s no surprise. If you’ve ever done a local U-Haul rental you know that those trucks tend to be more worn than the one-way rentals. So, I did the safe thing and drove the truck exactly at the speed limit, and even that required some sawing at the wheel to keep things going straight.

My heart pounded with every mile. I couldn’t help but notice that with every mile, the clouds were getting bigger and darker. My weather app suggested that Hagerstown was under a severe thunderstorm watch or warning and the area where the Ford was parked was soon about to get walloped by a nice big red area indicated by the radar. In fact, much of Maryland was under some kind of severe thunderstorm warning or even tornado watch. This was a serious weather event.

Thankfully, the weather gods had given me a break. I arrived in Hagerstown, and as I passed by the truck in the I-70 westbound lanes, it looked great and untouched. I rounded the cloverleaf at Highway 40, got into the I-70 eastbound lanes, and began approaching the F-350. That’s when the sky opened up the taps. A full-on downpour had arrived.

When It Rains

As I noted in part one, Ford Roadside Assistance had me form a makeshift sunroof cover out of the truck’s floor mats. I added my own blanket for a little extra protection. This had worked for the extremely light rain that Hagerstown got on Thursday night, but was doing little to stop this deluge. It wasn’t long before the water fully soaked the blanket and the floor mats, and it then started dripping through and into the truck.

It was in that moment when I realized that U-Haul trucks often come with huge, thick furniture pads. I figured I’d just eat the cost of soaking one of those and rolled open the U-Haul’s gate. As if my luck wasn’t bad enough, there was absolutely nothing in the U-Haul or the Honda Life that could help me.

Adding insult to injury was one of those stickers that cops put on your vehicle if you remain broken down on a highway for too long. I knew I was going to be gone before the time was up, but it was just one more twist of the knife, you know?

Next, I tried removing the tonneau cover from the truck’s bed. This would have been a great way to stop water from getting in. Only there was one small problem, as the key to unlock the tonneau cover was attached to the missing fob. Crap.

I sat there in the rain, getting absolutely soaked and defeated. As I looked around the truck bed, I saw my only path forward. I could not stop water from getting into the truck. But what if I could spare the interior by using something to absorb the water? I packed a lot of clothes for this trip and grabbed all of them.

I also noticed that while the blanket and floormats could not stop the water from getting in, I was able to largely steer where the water built up before leaking out of the blanket. I positioned the blanket to dump the majority of the water into all of my clothes. I laid my clothes out onto anything I thought was vulnerable to water. I mean I laid out all of my clothes, too. Within 10 minutes, everything I had brought on this trip had been sacrificed to save the truck.

Holding Out For A Hero

[Ed Note: Yikes! Obviously, we pride ourselves in taking care of press vehicles, though this kinda thing does happen! You lose your fob, and your sunroof is stuck wide open in the rain. The interesting thing is learning how well a modern truck holds up to this kind of situation… -DT]. 

Once I did all that I could, I called up Diane, my emergency contact at Ford. She had notified me that due to construction delays and traffic, the driver had been running about two or so hours behind. I told her that rain had begun falling in Hagerstown, so that the interior was getting wet. She noted that and asked me to be safe, as that was the most important thing.

Luckily, it wasn’t long after that call when the rain slowed down from pelting on me, to light and steady, to a drizzle, and then gone. The storm wasn’t gone, but a gap had formed in the storm that would give Hagerstown about an hour or so of a break. Diane said that the driver was about an hour away, so now the race was on again.

I drove to the hotel, parked the U-Haul, and then stood at the entrance. Back in 2012, I took about a year or two of Meteorology classes and I tried to use what I learned so long ago to predict when the next hit was going to happen. By my estimate, the rain that I just got soaked in was only an appetizer. The main course was coming and it was going to hit even harder.

The hour of waiting for the driver to show up had to have been one of the longest single hours I’ve lived in my entire life. I stood there, soaking wet, watching even darker clouds surround the area, and I was powerless to stop it. I could do nothing but see the big ball of red get closer and closer to Hagerstown, and hope that the storm might turn away or dissipate.

Thankfully, my knight in shining armor appeared at around the one-hour mark in a Ford Mustang GT California Special. To me in that moment, that Mustang was the coolest one I had seen in my life. The extremely kind gentleman tossed me the key, then we grabbed some towels before racing out to the truck.

The first thing we did was take down my makeshift sunroof cover and tossed it into the bed. Then, I fired up the truck, closed all open portals, then got out of there. We both reconvened at the hotel, where we used spare pool towels to do a hotel-side detailing.

The Platinum Plus Emerges Triumphant

We were surprised that my last-second decision to sacrifice my clothes had seemingly helped. The interior was decently dry. Two cupholders had a bit of water in them, the center console got wet, two seats were pretty wet, and the headliner was wet, but my clothes seem to have helped soak up the moisture, and the truck’s floors didn’t even get wet.

We did the best we could with an army of towels. Then, I pulled the truck over to the U-Haul, and swapped on the trailer. Finally, after nearly a day of being stuck, the F-350 was towing the Honda Life. I locked up the truck, and then drove the U-Haul back to where it came from.

As a side note, I totally want one of these U-Haul fuel economy gauges in one of my cars. This one was broken, but I still liked how cool it looked.

The heaviest part of the storm hit pretty much the moment when I hopped out of the U-Haul. First came the hail, then came rain so intense that I saw flash-flooding in some areas around me. Lightning and thunder cracked nearby, and I saw the lights go out in houses and businesses not far from where I stood at U-Haul. The rain was sideways, too. So, even as I waited under cover at U-Haul for an Uber, I was getting soaked from head to toe.

Had Ford’s guy been only an hour more behind schedule, the truck would have been done for. Even my clothes wouldn’t have been able to stop this.

Thankfully, that hadn’t been the case. My Uber dropped me off, I hopped in the truck and exactly 23 hours after the nightmare began, I was finally on the road for home. Somehow, the rain spared a single dress from getting drenched, so I put that one on.

At first, my method for drying the rest of the truck out involved using all four seat heaters on high and the HVAC system on hot, with the air-conditioner on. It was still raining heavily, so I couldn’t open a window to let in fresh air to help out.

I was shocked by how much the truck didn’t seem to care about being stuck in the rain. [Ed Note: I, too, am impressed given this is a modern truck full of electronics. -DT]. At first, the only real sign of what happened was that the driver seat was a little wet. About an hour into the drive, however, I started getting warnings on the instrument cluster that the truck’s trailer brake and trailer lighting modules were no longer functioning correctly.

I later found out that this had nothing to do with what I did, but that the trailer connections under the truck (which led to the plugs on the rear bumper) were getting blasted with water. Once I got out of the rain, I got the water out of the connectors, and the error went away. As it turns out, I’m not the only person to have run into these errors in a newer F-Series after driving in the rain. If you own one of these trucks, you may benefit from using some dielectric grease in the trailer lighting connectors under your truck.

Once I got free of the rain, I left all sources of heat on full blast, but then I also opened up the windows, too. I then drove the rest of the 700 miles home like that, just letting wind, heat, and air-conditioner pull moisture out of the truck.

I had one final issue with the truck, and it was that the driver-side motorized running board began failing to deploy. I would hear the motor turn on, but no actual movement. I began fearing that the truck had a casualty from my stupidity.

I was able to get the running board working again by cleaning out its joints. These running boards have a safety feature where they will not deploy or close if too much resistance is detected. Normally, that’s to protect the board from chomping on your foot, but it also means that your boards may not open if the joints are too dirty. Some Ford owners have told me that the F-350’s board probably needed some lube, too.

In the end, I drove nearly 800 miles back home, and the truck was flawless. It still got 14 mpg with the car on its back, and by the time I got it home, it was completely dry. I dried out the truck some more before Ford picked it up, and I’m happy to report that everything worked out. The headliner didn’t get a single stain, the truck still smelled brand-new, and there wasn’t a single error. I was even able to dry out my clothes when I got home.

Now, soon, you’ll get to read about my awesome little import and just how cool the 2025 Ford F-350 Platinum Plus really is. Stick around for that.

You Only Have One Life

Ultimately, the cost of my stupidity ended up being around $700. I know that I could have made about a million different better choices. Had I not put the key on the cowling, this wouldn’t have happened. Had I stopped as soon as I lost the key, maybe I might have found the key. Had I closed the windows before putting the truck in park, I wouldn’t have had to worry about water intrusion. Had I pulled off the highway and gone to a hotel or something, I wouldn’t have been stuck on a highway. Had I not canceled the tow, I wouldn’t have gotten a U-Haul stuck. Had I not tried to pull a U-turn on a highway, I wouldn’t have gotten the U-Haul stuck. Had I bought a tarp, the truck’s interior wouldn’t have gotten wet.

I can’t help but go through every stupid decision and beat myself up over how I could have possibly been so dumb to have strung together so many bad choices in just a few hours. I was genuinely sad and probably a bit hurtful to myself in the days immediately after this went down. I didn’t even fully enjoy the road trip back home because the events of the prior day weighed on my mind. Maybe I deserved it, or maybe I deserve worse. I’m not really sure.

Now, a couple of weeks later, I am being a bit nicer to myself. I’m also reminding myself that, sometimes, you’re the bug on the windshield. All of my pain was self-inflicted, but destroying myself won’t solve anything. The best I can do is do better and be better for next time.

Perhaps this was evident when I at least tried to make myself feel better by using the F-350’s built-in generator to run a flat iron to do my hair at a rest stop. My hair had been ruined by the rain the day before, but did I need to punish myself by letting it stay ruined? No.

I’ve been trying to have lessons to teach when telling this story in three parts, and I think I’ve found the lesson for this one. First, obviously, guard your fob like it were your pet or your kid. Put a tracking device on it if you have to. Likewise, basically every decision I made on that highway, from walking the median to trying to pull a U-turn in a box truck, was a terrible idea. Don’t do any of that, either.

However, at least for this third and final part of this, I think I want to say that you shouldn’t destroy yourself over mistakes. Humans are bound to make some real boneheaded choices. After all, our imperfections are part of what makes us human. Life would be boring if everyone were “perfect,” whatever that would even mean. At the end of the day, nobody got hurt, and the only real damage was to my bank account. It’s not worth spiraling oneself out of control over money. You can make more money, but there’s only one you. So, the next time you screw up, don’t do what I did and bully yourself into crying. Be kind to yourself.

Top Photo: Author