I just got a 03 Excursion 6.0L (230K all stock) that drives fine except when started cold it has 5-10 sec of white smoke, idles rough and has to warm up for 15+ minutes on cold days to drive otherwise it is low on power and won't rev past 2500-2900 rpm's (white smoke when it surges) until a few minutes then it all clears up.

I did some reading and found it could be injectors, FICM or possibly the VGT. The seller claims new injectors and glow plugs approx. 50K ago. I took it to the dealership and told them to plug it into the computer to check and they said the EGR is bad. I specifically asked them to check injectors, battery voltage, FICM voltage and they said it all checked good. Can a bad EGR cause cold start problems or is it unrelated?

 

If the egr cooler is still on the vehicle and is leaking it could allow coolant into intake tract during warm up. Im not sure if the 6.0 uses egr to speed up engine warm up time or not. You can pull the valve and see if there is coolant in the intake, the valve will be wet too if that's the case. Another possibility is injector stiction causing the problems. There are several ficm reflashes that address injector stiction on cold starts. Rev x oil additive can do wonders for stiction problems as well. Id check the egr valve situation and go from there. Personally Id delete the egr cooler, replace the oil cooler while in there and clean turbo. Install a coolant filter kit, get a fresh oil change and add rev-x. SCT has a new ficm tuner out that should have all the latest updates and adds a slight bump in hp and throttle response or you can have the ford dealer update the ficm.

 

What is this new FICM tuner that your talking about.
I just contacted SCT and they say that the SF3 does not support loading tunes to the FICM.

Is the FICM tuner a separate device that they are selling?

 

yes its separate flash tuner. Innovative sells it. SCT or Superchip piece, not sure if its directly available from them though. IDP Ford 6.0L Powerstroke FICM Programmer - Better mileage, more power, and great throttle response