Ford has $2B more in warranty costs than GM

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Guy I work with drove a f150 for years. Seemed to be a great truck and he has no intrest in maintaining any extra just the bare minimum. Never even washed the thing. Finally the tranny started giving him problems so he went out and bought a used car. A 2012 ford fusion with the dct!!! I’ve not even told him what’s to come being I’ve already warned him of his other purchase for his wife’s daily driver which is a Nissan Rogue with the cvt during the bad era. Forget the model year but confirmed it does fall in the bad cvt years back when he purchased it. So this guy has 2 of the worse trannys put out for his and his wife’s daily drivers. I’m amazed that so far he’s not had tranny issues on either.
If it's a fusion it should be a regular automatic. Just the focus and fiesta had the DCT AFAIK.
 
I’m a GM guy and was thinking about getting the new Bronco which I have a reservation for. But after reading this and hearing other stories about Ford now I don’t know .
New Bronco, yeah; New Ranger, HARD NO. It looks like one of the ugliest weirdest things I've ever seen. And I don't care if it has some kind of 9 or 10-speed transmission...
 
Corporate taxes are based on gross revenue, and simply changing that bottom line by subtracting costs would send people straight to jail.
As a retired IRS Special Agent I can assure you that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. My job was to send people to jail for tax evasion and money laundering. Trust me, you are most profoundly wrong.
 
Was it a 91? I was told they were especially bad by other employees at the Ford dealer who worked there long before me.
It wasn't just the 1990 & '91s, we had MASSIVE failures in the early '90s with the E4ODs, to the point that the company bought 100K mile extended warranties on them. Unfortunately, the Ford extended warranty didn't cover commercial use, so they got screwed & had to pay $3500-4000 to rebuild them anyway!! We had a cutaway '93 E-350 with a 14 foot box & liftgate that had the transmission rebuilt THREE TIMES! It was only when they swapped trannys with my '94 E-250 (that they were selling) that had all the updates done & put on a huge external cooler that the problems finally stopped. Ford engineers (hampered by their idjit bean counter superiors) are some of God's special people...
 
It wasn't just the 1990 & '91s, we had MASSIVE failures in the early '90s with the E4ODs, to the point that the company bought 100K mile extended warranties on them. Unfortunately, the Ford extended warranty didn't cover commercial use, so they got screwed & had to pay $3500-4000 to rebuild them anyway!! We had a cutaway '93 E-350 with a 14 foot box & liftgate that had the transmission rebuilt THREE TIMES! It was only when they swapped trannys with my '94 E-250 (that they were selling) that had all the updates done & put on a huge external cooler that the problems finally stopped. Ford engineers (hampered by their idjit bean counter superiors) are some of God's special people...
Yeah, I was told the e4od was a very unreliable transmission anyway, it just seemed 91 was worse than the rest but that included other transmissions also. The one in the Taurus wasn't as bad in 90, 91 it was basically guaranteed to fail. Some of them went to all electronic control in the 91 model year.
 
Yeah, I was told the e4od was a very unreliable transmission anyway, it just seemed 91 was worse than the rest but that included other transmissions also. The one in the Taurus wasn't as bad in 90, 91 it was basically guaranteed to fail. Some of them went to all electronic control in the 91 model year.
My 95 Taurus did have a very strange transmission problem, but I attributed it to that specific example of the car, not Ford as a whole.
 
My 95 Taurus did have a very strange transmission problem, but I attributed it to that specific example of the car, not Ford as a whole.
They honestly had less problems by 1995 and later. In 95 you could get lucky, 91 you were almost guaranteed a transmission failure, at least in the Taurus/Sable.

Actually my parents replaced their 1990 Taurus (which had almost zero problems but got wrote off at 140k miles in 1996-1998ish) with a 93 Sable. It had some weird transmission issues but also a bunch of other issues and got traded at like 50k miles before anything major happened. It also had the 3.8 engine which was guaranteed to blow a head gasket eventually. It was traded on a 95 Windstar which went 90k miles and then lost the transmission and head gaskets.
 
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They honestly had less problems by 1995 and later. In 95 you could get lucky, 91 you were almost guaranteed a transmission failure, at least in the Taurus/Sable.

Actually my parents replaced their 1990 Taurus (which had almost zero problems but got wrote off at 140k miles in 1996-1998ish) with a 93 Sable. It had some weird transmission issues but also a bunch of other issues and got traded at like 50k miles before anything major happened. It also had the 3.8 engine which was guaranteed to blow a head gasket eventually. It was traded on a 95 Windstar which went 90k miles and then lost the transmission and head gaskets.
Our Windstar had the famous "Transmission is fine but the selector ring failed" problem or something like that as well. It starts off as a whine..
 
Our Windstar had the famous "Transmission is fine but the selector ring failed" problem or something like that as well. It starts off as a whine..
Ours would fall into neutral randomly at red lights and slam into gear as RPM came up. Luckily we had our bulletproof 83 Pontiac Grand Prix to come to the rescue both times the Windstar failed.
 
Ours would fall into neutral randomly at red lights and slam into gear as RPM came up. Luckily we had our bulletproof 83 Pontiac Grand Prix to come to the rescue both times the Windstar failed.
That almost sounds like a slipping or sloppy trans.

I was younger, and I don't remember exactly but ours lost some/all of its gears.. needed replacement we couldn't give it.
 
Ahhhh, some of those bring back the memories! TFI module failures were reasonably common and some of the aftermarket ones were less reliable than OEM. The heat conduction compound would dry out and the modules would overheat. Using a thermal paste for a CPU (like Arctic Silver) seemed to help significantly, but of course the best solution was a relocation harness like Ford themselves used later on to mount the module to a heatsink away from the engine.
I remember my father always had a few extra TFI modules in his truck just incase.
 
I may have posted this in this thread but can't remember - I wonder how much of the higher warranty costs is from the fact that Ford seems to one-off build a lot of things? GM really doesn't have much genetic diversity and I have to imagine that keeps costs cown.


Yeah, I was told the e4od was a very unreliable transmission anyway, it just seemed 91 was worse than the rest but that included other transmissions also. The one in the Taurus wasn't as bad in 90, 91 it was basically guaranteed to fail. Some of them went to all electronic control in the 91 model year.
All of those transmissions were terrible. I really don't think Ford was much better than 90s Chrysler when it came to 4 speed automatics. I've known a few people with E4OD transmissions to be pulling hard and blow the front seal out of the transmission. It pumps dry quick and that's the end of it. But the lighter AODE and A4LD transmissions were also garbage. And the Windstar/Taurus transmissions.

I do like some things on Fords. If I were to build my "dream pickup" from scratch, it'd be a 99-04 SuperDuty with a GM powerplant. I have never liked GM interiors and I really don't like Chrysler Interiors. It's not that the Chrysler interiors seem cheap, I just don't like their design language.

Ford doesn't seem to build anything to be worked on. My Focus was impossible to do a lot of things on. I had to send stuff to a mechanic that I should have been able to do myself. The lower radiator hose on my truck - 5 hour job because of how they have the lines routed and connected. My truck needs a head gasket. If it was a pushrod engine, or even an overhead cam engine that was IN THE ENGINE BAY, I'd be able to do it. It's under the dash like a van but with no doghouse. Just not possible for me to get in there and take the head off to do the gasket.
 
Did he make his own skinning socket to take them out or did he buy the tool? I bought the tool.

I don't remember too much about it. He got rid of the truck 20 years ago. May not even have been TFI now that I think about it -- maybe duraspark? Was an 87 f250 light duty with a TBI 302. Definitely always had ignition issues.

He did have a few spare factory style modules and he also carried an emergency TFI kit/box. The kit/box thing he had would connect to the coil and to the distributor , then to the battery for power and it would let the truck run. But with no advance/retard on the timing. I remember we had to use it once and the truck didn't run great, but it did make it home so he could change out the module.

I'm pretty sure I know where that is in their garage. I just saw it over the summer. I'll have to see if I can remember next time I'm there to try to grab it.
 
As a retired IRS Special Agent I can assure you that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. My job was to send people to jail for tax evasion and money laundering. Trust me, you are most profoundly wrong.
I'm an accountant and my pops is a CPA. I was surprised how many people evade taxes and wind up broke. I'm talking guys making $500,000+ a year... Go broke, because of not paying their taxes... No idea how such dumb people got rich to begin with, oh yeah, they Cheat and must be blessed by Satan himself.
 
This goes even further back in my experience with a 1985 Ranger. It kept blowing the ECU which was covered the first two times it died. I paid for the subsequent two failures. Along with other issues that truck was in the shop a few times a year.
 
For the claimed warranty costs... I wonder if Ford (and its suppliers) are honoring their warranty more than GM is. Or maybe GM has better lawyers and looking for more ways to deny warranty coverage. Just a thought.
It's hard to get GM to replace anything under warranty. Every issue "cannot be replicated or within tolerance, or designed that way." Vehicle warranties have become such a joke.
 
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