We've been highly critical of Toyota in the past so it's only justifiable that we hammer on the US car makers as well when they make mistakes.
Ford Motor Company, the only car maker to not accept government bailout money, announced a recall of it's most popular F-150 pickup due to a faulty cable that can trigger the airbag to deploy. The company has recalled 1.2 million trucks from 2004 and 2005, and for part of 2006.
Ford Motor Company's F series pickup truck is the most popular selling series in the US and the F-150 makes up more than half of those sales. The company was aware of the problem and tried to avoid the recall until officials from the NHTSA forced the company to expand the recall in an effort to keep customers safe. The
Ford Motor Company claimed drivers would be warned with a light before the airbag deployed, however NHTSA officials did not want to risk further injuries, and thus the expansion of the recall. I'm sure there's some sort of Tommy Boy reference to be made in here, but we'll let that one slide for now. As always, if you are a
Ford Motor Company F-150 owner and are concerned about the recall or have any questions, please feel free to contact the company.
It's interesting to see the company fight back against the NHTSA's urging to increase the recall. Obviously no company wants to issue a recall because it costs money to fix, but more importantly, it admits a mistake with a faulty product. It's not like this was a faulty wiring in the headlights. It's a major problem with the airbag deploying. Imagine driving along and then BOOM, lights out because the airbag deployed and you can't see anything? Not really sure what
Ford was thinking with fighting back against this. It seems so cut and dry, especially when there were already 269 known cases of this happening, resulting in 98 injuries. Oh only 36% of the time people are being hurt by your products? Sign me up for a new truck! Either way, it's great to see the company doing right by expanding the recall, even if it took urging from the government. Companies that admit their faults are more likely to gain quicker acceptance from customers, resulting in a higher probability those customers will return in the future for newer, safer, and more (or less?) exciting products.
If you want to read more about the recall,
click here.
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Posted by GetHuman on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 2:48pm