Ford Motor Co. will compensate owners of 718,000 vehicles with 3.8-liter V-6 engines prone to head-gasket failures.
Affected are the 1994-’95 Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable, the ’95 Ford Windstar mini-van and the ’94 Lincoln Continental. Owners are expected to begin receiving notification by the end of this month that if their engines required repairs because of bad head gaskets, they may qualify for compensation or a $4,000 certificate toward the purchase of a new Ford, Lincoln or Mercury.
Ford will extend its head-gasket warranty for the front-wheel-drive vehicles to seven years or 100,000 miles. For ’94 models sold so early in ’93 that the seven-year period has elapsed, the warranty will run through Oct. 1 or 100,000 miles.
The campaign even will compensate for repairs not made at Ford dealerships, and it covers used cars. There is no limit to the amount that Ford will pay in reimbursement, even for engines that had to be replaced because the damage was beyond repair.
If any of the designated vehicles needs a new engine because of a head-gasket problem and one is not available within five days, the consumer would be able to sell the vehicle to Ford at a price based on the wholesale value set by the National Automobile Dealers Association. Those consumers also would get a $3,000 certificate toward the purchase of a new Ford, Lincoln or Mercury.
A head gasket is a thin seal between the engine block and the cylinder head. If it fails, coolant may leak out of the engine, causing overheating, or into the mechanical components, potentially causing engine failure.
Ford has declined to discuss the cost of the program, but it is likely to be $200 million to $250 million, said Joe Grant, president of J&L Warranty Pros Inc., an Auburn, Mich., firm that tracks warranty repairs. That assumes that about half of the head gaskets have failed or will fail.
Ford first publicly acknowledged the gasket problem in 1998, when it extended the three-year or 36,000-mile warranty on the Taurus, Sable and Windstar to five years or 60,000 miles. The Continental’s four-year, 50,000-mile warranty was stretched to six years or 75,000 miles.
Ford sent letters to the owners then, telling them there might be a problem, said spokesman Mike Vaughn. But later, “as we looked at the data, we saw a significant failure rate outside of that extended warranty,” he said, leading to the seven-year, 100,000-mile coverage.
Thousands of customers have complained of problems with the 3.8-liter, an overhead-valve engine made at the Essex plant in Windsor, Ontario. Ford also faced class-action suits in Chicago and Toledo and lobbying from the Center for Auto Safety in Washington.
The center said that replacing the head gaskets cost an average of $1,648 and that engine replacements cost up to $4,200. It said the failures occurred, on average, around 65,000 miles.
“They were facing a consumer revolt and legal action,” said Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director of the center.
“We made this decision based on the data and doing what’s right for our customers,” Vaughn said. He added that Ford believed there was no basis for the lawsuits and they should be dismissed.
The engine has powered many Ford vehicles, including rear-wheel-drive cars such as Mustangs and Thunderbirds. But the extended warranty covers only the four front-drive models, which used several other engines as well.
Ditlow urged Ford to include 1993 models in the campaign, along with rear-drive Mustangs and Thunderbirds.
Though the company has not extended the warranty for the other models, it is continuing to look at data on other head-gasket failures, Vaughn said.
He said an updated version of the engine, with extensive engineering changes, was still being used in Windstar and, in a different configuration with a different cooling system, in Mustang.
