Well, we have been officially notified by our dealer that our 2022 Aviator that just arrived at the dealership is part of this recall and has a NO SALE HOLD on it. They told me they are waiting for more information from Lincoln/Ford on what option there are. They mentioned replacing the engine rails, I said I will not take the vehicle after that major of a recall/repair..... So now we have to decide do we reorder now and hope that the commodity restraints don't bite us, or do we choose to hang onto our 2015 Explorer for a couple more years till this all hopefully blows over.....
I'm sorry to hear of your plight.
It sounds like they may be a bit premature based on what was read. There was a large population of potentially impacted vehicles in the time window but from what I recall a relatively small population of those actually had deficient material (almost randomly distributed as documented in the reports). I say this assuming they have not done the testing at your dealership to validate if your actual frame rails are of deficient strength.
NDE (Non Destructive Examination) techniques are the means they can easily determine if your vehicle is affected. I understand the defects were discovered in the bolt torqueing of critical sub-frame connectors. With such experience, if done by hand, the torque wrench operator simply knows it doesn't feel right - the fastener will rotate a good bit more than normal. If mechanistically (perhaps robotically) torqued, my assumption is the automated torque machines have pre-programmed limits for things like deflection and or rotation prior to achieving the desired preload.
If a vehicle was released to the dealership, it failed no test. This is important to note. It left the factory with no failed tests or they would have scrapped/reworked. I believe your vehicle simply falls in one of the potentially suspect vehicles from the questionable timeframe.
If that's the case - then with a simple hardness test they can ascertain to an order of magnitude (well within the strength thresholds of the potentially deficient metal or good material) if you are fine or dubious. Said test is easy to perform on the frame rails (the classic one is a Charpy impact test).
Lacking such tests, tell them BS - validate if your frame rails are deficient OR NOT! If they did such tests in situ at your dealership (I highly doubt it) - most certainly I agree with you that I would not trust the local dealership to do the potentially significant effort without some significant extension in warranty for those impacted areas (e.g. 100K, 7 years or more for ANY impacted element of the car touched by their retrofit activities).
For what it's worth, I'm a retired PE and I worked in Nuclear Power industry in the group at our company that did these exact same assessments, studies and remedies. We had a Scanning Electron Microscope and two phenomenal engineers I worked with (one a Masters in Mechanical, BS in Chemical from my alma mater - Georgia Tech, the other a University of Ohio Welding Certified Engineer that worked in Westinghouse Nuclear prior to coming to our company. our boss came from Com Ed with a similar background and was an industry expert in Reactor Vessel coupons used to predict vessel hardness - this very issue - for reactors). I worked on numerous failure analyses that had these same fundamental concerns.
To summarize - determining if your car is has deficient frame rail strength is child's play - a simple Charpy impact test that can be done with a calibrated device in seconds for multiple spots on the frame rails. This will without fail determine if the material is deficient or not. If it is, then only you can determine if you trust them enough to effect repair and swap them out.
Good luck and please keep us posted. Feel free to PM me to get my contact information. I'd be more than happy to give you guidance here. These are great vehicles; it would be a shame for you to forego acceptance of a perfectly fine car in the event these dudes don't know how to do very simple and elemental validation of if the material is deficient or not.
