Ford Expands Switch Recall
Ford Motor Co. said Thursday that it was adding 1.2 million pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and vans in the United States to a recall begun last year to repair a faulty speed control switch that can short-circuit and cause fires in the engine compartment.
The automaker recalled about 4.6 million trucks in two separate actions last year for the same problem. Collectively, the 5.8 million vehicles affected make this the fourth-largest automotive recall on record. The move is the latest in a string of woes for the second-largest U.S. automaker.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating Ford’s speed switch problem in March 2005, two months after the automaker recalled 790,000 vehicles for the problem. NHTSA and Ford have received 1,472 complaints about the switch and 65 fires have been reported, agency spokesman Rae Tyson said.
Ford and NHTSA said there had been no reports of injuries related to fires from faulty switches, but the company is facing three lawsuits alleging fatalities stemming from fires in which the speed switch was a cause.
Ford does not believe that the speed control was at fault in any of the cases, company spokeswoman Kristen Kinley said Thursday. All three suits are pending.
The new recall covers F-250, F-350, F-450 and F-550 pickup trucks from the 1994-2002 model years, 1994-96 Econoline vans, heavy-duty Econoline E-450 vans from the 1996-2002 model years, 1998 model Explorer and Mercury Mountaineer SUVs and 2000-02 Excursion SUVs. Owners can call the company at (888) 222-2751 for more information.
Ford has the largest recall in history on its books: about 8.6 million vehicles in 1996 to repair a faulty ignition switch. General Motors Corp. holds second and third places with the recalls of 6.7 million trucks in 1971 to repair a faulty engine mount and 5.82 million vehicles in 1981 for a rear suspension problem.
Ford believes that the new recall will take care of all vehicles affected by the problem.
“We knew last year there was an issue, but we didn’t understand why,” Kinley said. “Today, after an exhaustive investigation conducted with NHTSA, we have identified the cause.”
The speed control switch is part of the vehicle’s braking system. It cuts electrical power to a vehicle’s cruise control when the brakes are tapped.
“There are about 20 million Ford vehicles that use this same switch,” said NHTSA’s Tyson, explaining why it took more than a year to discover the cause and identify the vehicles affected.
Ford said that it had a sufficient supply of special fused wiring harnesses in stock to repair all of the affected vehicles. The automaker, based in Dearborn, Mich., would not disclose the estimated cost of the recall.
The recall comes during a week when Ford said that its luxury division would not be profitable this year, and that it had hired a turnaround expert to help it figure out what to do with poorly performing assets, including its money-losing Jaguar subsidiary. Ford also restated its second-quarter financial report to boost its net loss for the period to $254 million, more than double the $123 million previously reported.
And on Tuesday, industrywide retail sales for July revealed that Ford had slipped into third place in the U.S. for the first time as a surging Toyota Motor Corp. vaulted into second, behind GM.
