So Many Questions

Ford South Africa has belatedly recalled one of its fire-prone models, but others have been burning too. Chris Barron asked CEO Jeff Nemeth . . .

Things seem to be going from bad to worse. We’ve got well over 3 000 people — we’ve got their (1.6-litre EcoBoost) Kugas into dealerships and we’ve got them into courtesy cars. But it’s not only the model you’ve recalled that is combusting, is it? I can only comment on vehicles that we’ve had the opportunity to inspect and evaluate. The problem is the customers have not contacted us so we’re still trying to get access to those vehicles to ascertain what happened. A customer with a 2.5-litre Titanium Kuga that caught fire in 2015, Sean Thompson, said he alerted Ford SA and got no response. We’re trying to chase down that information. Do you think if you’d done that at the time Reshall Jimmy, who died when his Kuga caught fire three months later, could still be alive? Like I said, I don’t know anything about Sean Thompson’s vehicle. We’re trying to chase that down right now. It is a different model. As were many of the others that caught fire. Why recall only the 1.6-litre EcoBoost? The 1.6-litre enginecompartment fire is the one we understand. We’ve had reports and investigations into that one. I want to point out that the Jimmy incident was not an enginecompartment fire. Does it matter if it was an enginecompartment fire or one caused by an electrical fault? The cause of the Jimmy fire is still undetermined. Not the cause of the fire in the vehicles we’ve recalled. What caused those fires? An overheating condition caused by the lack of circulation of engine coolant. Are you satisfied this is the problem? Absolutely. We’ve had 39 reported to us. Six of those vehicles were already [disposed of] by insurance companies as scrap so we don’t have access to those. But all the others we’ve examined, we’ve dissected, we’ve sent parts overseas to our engineering centres, we’ve shipped the vehicle to Europe so they could evaluate the whole vehicle. Our engineering team is confident it is an overheating condition that we are addressing with our recall. What about reports and investigations that have found that many of the fires were caused by electrical faults? Those are inconsistent with our findings, and I would encourage any of those investigative reports to be sent to us so that we could have sight of those. They’ve already been sent to you, haven’t they? Who told you that? Discovery Insure said they alerted you five times to the findings of an investigator, as did other insurance companies. I’ll have to follow up on that. Did you investigate any of the reports suggesting that the fires were caused by electrical faults and not the coolant or the weather? I would have to verify that we received those reports. Didn’t you know about the report by police and fire investigators that the fire that killed Jimmy was caused by an electrical fault? I’m aware that that is the claim, but we have not seen those reports either. Whose fault is that? We went to court to ask for those. We’re doing everything we can to get to the bottom of the Jimmy incident. What about the 47 other Fords that caught fire in the past two years? Thirty-nine is what we are aware of, that have been reported to us. Why have you only ordered a recall now, when you received 39 reports over two years? During the second half of 2016, once the weather started warming up, we started seeing an escalation in the number of incidents. When that happened we immediately had a maintenance check communicated to our customers asking them to bring their vehicles in. When was this? In December. Two years after the first incident was reported? It’s important to understand that when there is a fire, as the fire burns it destroys the evidence. Our engineers can only act on the data that they have. How long after your cars started burning did you consult Ford in the US? The very first fire we had, we shipped the car to Germany. And consulted your counterparts in the US? Correct. So you knew they’d ordered a mass recall as a result of similar incidents with a similar model? Our engineers would be well aware of any recalls that are done on any vehicles. They ordered a recall after 11 cars combusted. Why did you wait for 39 cars to combust before ordering a recall? We can only act on the data that we have. Why did your US counterparts order the recall so much more quickly? All we can act on is the way the cars perform in South Africa and the data we have in South Africa. Even when the same model was involved and the incidents were the same? The steering wheel is on the other side of the car. So the cooling plumbing in the vehicle is completely different. Should you have responded more quickly? In hindsight, yes, it seems like we should have acted quicker.