Judge Orders Ford Recall Over Ignition
A California judge declared Wednesday that Ford Motor Co. had deceived safety regulators and consumers concerning a stalling problem in millions of its vehicles and ordered the firm to replace faulty ignition devices or repay customers who fixed them themselves. The ruling set the stage for one of the largest automotive recalls in history and the first to be initiated by a judge.
The decision by Judge Michael E. Ballachey of Alameda County Superior Court affects about 3.5 million California residents who own or formerly owned Ford vehicles equipped with an electronic component known as the thick film ignition module, or TFI.
Ford installed the device on 29 models between 1983 and 1995, including the Taurus, LTD, Ranger, Bronco, Mustang and Escort.
In the largest class-action case ever brought against an auto maker, Ballachey found that the Ford vehicles were prone to stalling because Ford’s placement of the modules on the distributor, where they would be exposed to engine heat, made them vulnerable to failure.
Many of the vehicles covered by the recall are no longer on the road, but an estimated 1.7 million of them still are in use in California.
Ballachey said Ford sold as many as 23 million vehicles with the TFI flaw, but his ruling is limited to those sold in California. Similar class-action suits are pending in Alabama, Maryland, Illinois, Tennessee and Washington.
Ballachey criticized Ford in his 19-page order, saying the company had thwarted federal traffic safety officials by using “tortured interpretations of common language to avoid its responsibilities.” At the brief hearing in Oakland, where Ballachey issued the order, he announced his appointment of San Francisco attorney Jerome Falk to serve as referee and iron out details of the recall, which could cost Ford hundreds of millions of dollars.
However, the recall could be delayed for several months at least, as remaining issues in the case are worked out and Ford pursues appeals.
The defeat is another body blow for Ford, already buffeted by bad publicity involving the Firestone tire recall and fatal rollover crashes of its Explorer sport-utility vehicles fitted with the suspect tires. As with the massive tire recall, the TFI case has focused on the safety of Ford products as well as its candor in dealing with regulators and consumers.
Ford officials said they will appeal Wednesday’s ruling, since Ballachey was wrong in finding that the vehicles are defective, and lacked legal authority to order a recall.
“No state court anywhere has that authority,” said Ford spokesman Jim Cain, adding that “the recall would serve no purpose because there’s nothing to fix.
“It’s absolutely not true that there is a pandemic of stalling Ford vehicles with defective TFI modules,” Cain said.
On a few occasions in the past, federal judges have had to rule on whether to uphold recalls ordered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that regulates vehicle safety. But no judge--federal or state--has ever ordered a recall on his own.
For Ford, the stakes could be enormous, because similar class-action cases involving TFI failures are pending in five other states.
Moreover, on top of the recall, plaintiffs in the California case plan to ask Ballachey to award damages of up to $1,000 for each of the 3.5 million class members--or $3.5 billion in all--as provided under the state’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act.
From the start, Ford has argued that the dispute had minimal safety overtones, as there had never been a proven case of injury or death resulting from a TFI-related stall. Without admitting liability, however, Ford has settled about 15 injury or death claims out of court alleging TFI failures, Cain said.
The TFI module is a device that regulates the flow of electrical current to spark plugs. From 1983 to 1995, Ford installed it in about 22 million Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles, more than half of which are still on the road.
Other manufacturers also used the TFI, but plaintiffs’ attorneys said Ford’s decision to mount the device on the distributor exposed it to excessive heat, causing a high rate of failures and serious stalling problems--not only when vehicles were started but also at highway speeds.
In his ruling Wednesday, Ballachey said the evidence showed Ford all along had been well aware that electrical components such as TFI were “vulnerable to ‘thermal stress’ and that heat was the enemy of electronic devices.” Moreover, he wrote, the modules “began to manifest failure, both in testing and under field conditions almost immediately.”
Yet the decision to mount the devices on the distributor, “flawed at the outset, has been fiercely and stubbornly defended ever since.”
Ford in 1987 did conduct a recall of 1.1 million four-cylinder cars whose TFI warranty replacements had reached an extraordinarily high rate of more than 40%.
But plaintiffs argued, and Ballachey agreed, that that recall had been improperly narrow and should have been extended to millions of other vehicles. Warranty replacement rates for models not included in the recall ranged from less than 1% to more than 16%, according to evidence in the case.
On four separate occasions, NHTSA opened defect investigations into stalling problems in non-recalled vehicles but each time wound up being persuaded by Ford that further recalls weren’t warranted.
However, plaintiffs lawyers said Ford had improperly withheld pertinent documents that might have prompted NHTSA to seek a wider recall.
Appearing as a plaintiffs witness, former NHTSA Associate Administrator Michael Brownlee identified 17 documents that he said Ford should have provided in response to NHTSA queries but had withheld. In response to the allegations, NHTSA conducted its own inquiry and concluded that five of the documents had been improperly withheld. Pointing out that the violations had occurred a decade earlier and would result, at most, in minimal civil penalties, NHTSA took no further action.
But Ballachey ruled that Ford had “withheld . . . information from NHTSA that it was obligated to divulge.”
Ballachey said the referee will determine procedures for people who replaced failed modules on their own to file claims for reimbursement. As for vehicles that are still on the road with the distributor-mounted modules, he said the referee would consider various alternatives, including requiring Ford to install more robust modules, mount the module farther from the engine or buy back the vehicle.
But Ford officials said Wednesday that a recall can’t begin until appeals are exhausted and that an appeal can’t be filed until a final order is entered in the complex case.
Still to be determined are potential damages for class members and whether awards could be considered by the judge or must be argued before a jury.
Indeed, the case has been bifurcated, with a jury considering certain claims and Ballachey others.
Last November, in the initial jury phase of the trial, the panel deadlocked on whether Ford had committed two different violations of the consumer legal remedies act. Jurors had favored the plaintiffs 7-5 and 8-4 on the two questions before them, but a 9-3 vote was required for the verdict.
That set the stage for Ballachey to hear additional claims that, by law, must be decided by a judge.
Jeff Fazio, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he will now ask Ballachey to award damages to class members. Cain, of Ford, said the company will argue that only a jury can decide on damages.
* SAFETY BILL PASSES
Auto-safety legislation is sent to President Clinton. C3
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Models Affected
Ford Motor Co. says these models were equipped with distributor-mounted TFI-IV modules. For details, contact Ford at (800) 392-3673.
*--*
Model Year(s) * Aerostar 1986-90 * Bronco 1984-91 * Bronco II 1984-90 * Capri 1983-86 * Continental 1984-87 * Cougar 1984-88 * Crown Victoria 1984-91 * E-Series 1984-91 * Escort 1983-90 * EXP 1983-88 * F-Series 1984-91 * F-Stripped Chassis 1989 * Grand Marquis 1984-91 * LN7 1983 * LTD 1984-86 * Lynx 1983-87 * Mark 1984-92 * Marquis 1984-86 * Merkur 1985-89 * Mustang 1983-93 * Probe 1990-92 * Ranger 1983-92 * Sable 1986-95 * Scorpio 1988-89 * Taurus 1986-95 * Tempo 1984-94 * Thunderbird 1983-88 * Topaz 1984-94 * Town Car 1984-90
*--*
Source: Associated Press
