The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was ending its investigation into complaints about a problem with Ford pickups and SUVs suddenly losing power. It covered as many as 411,000 vehicles.
The query, open for more than two years, started with looking into problems with Ford Broncos equipped with 2.7-liter EcoBoost engines. The question was if the engines had valvetrain issues. NHTSA expanded the probe to include other 2021 and 2022 model-year vehicles with 2.7-liter and 3.0-liter engines.
The affected vehicles included the Ford Edge, F-150 and Explorer, as well as the Lincoln Aviator and Nautilus. Under normal driving conditions and without warning, vehicles may lose power and be unable to restart due to a faulty valve. NHTSA said it had 1,066 unique vehicle reports of the issue.
Ultimately, Ford recalled about 90,000 vehicles — instead of the full 411,000 — because the company determined not all valves produced for those trucks and utes were defective. The problem “batch” was limited to a short run.
What’s next
The recall has dealers inspecting the vehicle and testing them to see if they’ve met a minimum usage level to cause the valves to be defective. According to the automaker, most of the affected vehicles had problems before being driven 20,000 miles. In fact, half made it less than 5,000 miles before the problem cropped up.
According to the filing, the engine valves cracked and fell into the combustion chamber of the engine causing catastrophic engine damage. The issue was due to valves that exceeded the designed specification for hardness, were brittle, and more likely to break, citing the supplier’s manufacturing processes, according to the NHTSA statement.
Ford changed the material used for the intake valve after October 2021. NHTSA said the rate of reported failures related to the faulty valve issue had declined since November 2021.
Ford plans to provide an extended warranty coverage on the 90,000 recalled vehicles for 10 years or 150,000 miles. It also said it was unaware of any crashes or injuries as a result of the issue.
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