Ford Kuga

We’re fostering a 2012 Ford Kuga 1,6 Ecoboost Ambiente as a long-term test car to see if it’s still a good purchase and how Ford is addressing the fiery situations that have made this SUV grab the headlines for all the wrong reasons. LINDSEY SCHUTTERS REP

How do you restore faith in a brand?

Narrator: “A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, a, multiply by the probable rate of failure, b, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, c. So a times b times c equals x. If x is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”

Businesswoman on plane: “Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?” Narrator: “You wouldn’t believe.” Businesswoman on plane: “Which car company do you work for?” Narrator: “A major one.” That dialogue comes from the 1999 movie adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club. The then nameless narrator is explaining his job as an insurance claim investigator to one of his “singleserving friends”, which is how he describes the people he meets on airplanes. The exchange tees up the central theme, which deals with the system’s indifference to the average man in the street.

I’m reminded of this scene every time there’s public pressure on a car manufacturer to do a product recall. It came to mind while my son was sleeping in his car seat in the back of a 2012 Ford Kuga Ecoboost while stuck in Cape Town CBD traffic. I’m actually on my way to drop it off to have the recall work done and anxiety is high. But I may be getting ahead of myself. So, let me explain.

Ford is responsible for the person I am today. My dad was a company man since Ford Motor Company South Africa’s inception. His career started at the Chrysler factory in Elsies River at the tender age of 15, after being expelled from school for allegedly coming to blows with a teacher. A series of takeovers and mergers saw him move to Pretoria with the Sigma group, which in turn became Samcor and finally morphed into the Ford that sent us the car in question.

I’m also the only person in my immediate family to never have owned a Ford/samcor motorcar. My sisters both currently drive Fords and had only owned Silvertonproduced products before that. Even my father-in-law currently operates a Volvo V40, which was shipped through Pretoria, and a locally built Ford Ranger that rolled off my father’s LCV production line (colorectal cancer forced my father into retirement as manager of that production line after he successfully introduced the T5 Ranger). My dad drives a Focus sedan and was about to trade it on a Kuga, but then they started catching fire.

Though he has a soft spot for Volvo and

a strong platkar leaning, I had never seen him shop outside of the blue oval badge line-up until 2016. Mustang remains his wildest ambition, but there has been a steady increase in enquiries when I bring home competitor products. He is a big fan of the current Honda Civic sedan, for instance. And this can all be traced back to the Kuga issue and how Ford dealt with it. There’s a distinct sense of betrayal when we dissected the developing stories around the defect and the subsequent media fallout. Ford is no longer the first choice for my father.

This deep dive into the Kuga recall was proposed by Ford Motor Company South Africa. They sourced the affected model for Popular Mechanics to live with over the course of six months and report on our findings. I see it as an opportunity to restore my father’s faith in a company to which he devoted more than 40 years of his life.

To be fair, there isn’t a single car manufacturer on this Earth that hasn’t ever faced public outcry around a defect. Before Kuga, the infamous fatality was the tragic death of the daughter of satirist Justin Nurse as flames consumed the Honda Jazz in which she was sleeping. Initially, forensic experts absolved Honda, but the company issued a product recall almost four years later to address arcing electronics in the driver side door. More recently, Mercedes-Benz SA is gearing up for a recall of 5 100 vehicles manufactured from 2015 to this year for a potential overheating issue after the German parent company reported 51 fires among affected models.

There’s a tolerable rate of failure inherent in every vehicle model on the road and it comes down to the company reaction to the fault that will shape public perception of the brand. My dad recalls a story of the first four-litre V6 Ranger bakkies to come off the production line. According to him, the accelerator cables would jam, leaving the throttles fully opened. Ford had to reengineer the cable guides before continuing production. It sounds callous, but you want the faults to happen in the factory rather than on public roads.

Clinton Pretorius, service manager at County Ford in Kuils River, explained that the Kugas coming in for recall work have an average of around 38 000 km on the odometer. The media storm erupted four years after the last of the affected models went on sale. I have owner testimony of a car that succumbed to the issue after about 18 months of ownership.

The recall affects 4 556 1,6-litre

Ecoboost-equipped Kugas and has since been expanded to Fiesta ST models that share the same engine. The maintenance work involves replacing the coolant reservoir with a newer design that uses different hosing and is placed further away from the turbocharger. There is also new heat shielding added and a general assessment of engine cooling function.

It was explained to me that the primary cause of overheating is poor coolant reservoir bottle design. The reservoir developed hairline cracks through expansion and contraction from exposure to high temperatures. What’s distressing is that the car I took in to have the work done had already started showing signs of the fault, evidenced by watermarks below that plastic coolant bottle. There was still sufficient fluid, but a couple more months of regular use could have been catastrophic.

To date, Ford has provided more than 4 000 courtesy vehicles to affected customers for use when their vehicles are receiving the maintenance work. In addition to that, it has extended the warranty on the affected components. The company also sponsors the fuel for the 50 km test drives that each car is subjected to, as well as reaching an agreement with the AA to offer enhanced roadside assistance to Kuga customers with affected vehicles.

I received very good service with the initial recall job at County Ford in Kuils River and will report back in the coming months as the car is put to use as my daily driver.

For now, the anxiety has subsided.

Ford identified the coolant reservoir and coolant hose design as the cause of the problem. The recall work sees the overflow bottle replaced with a unit that sits lower in the engine bay and the new hose routed away from the turbocharger.

Former Ford company man Melvin Schutters is familiar with factory defects, but in his day those remained in the factory. The Kuga needs to convince him of its lasting quality.

Each Kuga that receives the modifications is returned with a detailed account of what work was done.