This makes me sick
 

yet again. Whos next?

The gov really needs to do something about this type of crap. If there is a safety defect in your vehicle that can potentially kill someone it needs to be mandated by the law to be fixed asap and not left up to the manufacturer to get around to it when they feel like it.


http://jalopnik.com/5715961/ford-slo...ect-gets-rossd

That is negligence at its finest ladies and gentlemen. I hope they sue the pants off Ford and get as much compensation as possible...although nothing can replace a family member.

If those roll bars weren't sticking 3 feet out from every corner of that van, that thing would have flipped numerous times...at that was only at 35 MPH? Let's see what happens at 60 MPH...Sickening.

In that video it looked to be a newer Freestar and not even a Windstar though.

Every make is guilty of this. Until our government steps up this will continue.

unfortunately, very true.

Why do we need the government to babysit us? The best solution for this kind of thing is for the government to stay the hell out of the way. The government can't do anything about this. What is the government going to do, mandate that as soon as a problem is found in ONE car you issue a recall for every car in the model line? Seriously if the government gets involved in every little freaking problem your 35K Camaro will eventually cost well over 100K. Why you ask will the price go up so much, simple car companies will not eat the cost of potentially recalling every mass produced automobile and will simple build that potential cost into the price of every car. So with hundreds of thousands of parts on any given car times hundreds of thousands of dollars in recall expenses your average car will be astronomically unaffordable by anybody and every car manufacturer will go out of business. Now is getting the government involved in this really such a good idea?

I'm glad we don't drive a Ford van in my household.....not just for being non-safe but because they look dorky.

Just put some firestone tires on it and really live on the edge!

:sm0:

The only positive way I can see the government getting involved with this situation is to mandate better safety inspections, or perhaps requiring a quick response time on all recall notifications (especially for ones that are potentially life threatening like this). Other than that, the judicial system is more than capable of handling the lawsuits that will not doubt result from this. Very tragic that the Bowman family received the recall notice a week too late.

There were times when I was tempted to put Firestones on my old exploder. But I would have cheated myself out of 4500 bucks in trade so.. :cool:

:word:

Ok, I am going to play the devils advocate here. So this affects windstars from 98 to 03. Which means the oldest one has been on the road 12-13 years depending on original sale date. So, in that 8-13 years the axle began to rust, not unexpected. Also, the recall is limited to northern states which use salt to combat icy roads. So, the implication is that the salt exacerbated the typical rust that one would expect.

Based on that one has to ask what happened to routine maintenance checks? I'm not saying everything would be caught there. What about those who see rust on the body, which is painted and sealed while axles are raw metal, was that dismissed? I read most of the comments in the article and the theme was that they noticed something before the axle broke, not 100% but most, such as their rear end going one direction while they were steering another or a loud sound which wasn't present before.

These cars clearly aren't new and have significant mileage on them. There have been no problems in the south reported. The axles aren't snapping at 40k... More like 100-140k.

Think about it as a whole.

Thoughts?