Memos: Ford made Explorer roof weaker

[pupp1]

Ford made Explorer roof weaker
Automaker says SUV exceeds federal safety standards and is a safe vehicle.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- When 26-year-old Claire Duncan died of a fractured skull after a severe rollover accident in her 2000 Ford Explorer, her family wanted answers.

Their questions about how the SUV's roof caved in led to a lawsuit and ultimately a trial this month that uncovered internal Ford Motor Co. documents and memos that raise serious questions about the Explorer's roof and the automaker's contention that stronger vehicle roofs do not prevent deaths and injuries in rollovers.

On March 18, a Jacksonville, Fla., jury ruled the Explorer's roof was defective and ordered Ford to pay Duncan's husband $10.2 million for economic damages, pain and suffering.

Company documents shown to the jury revealed the Explorer's roof was made weaker when the SUV was redesigned twice in the 1990s -- after engineers recommended strengthening the roof earlier in the decade. Duncan's lawyers also used internal company memos that show Ford's Volvo subsidiary considered roof strength critical to protecting passengers in rollover crashes.
FULL ARTICLE

[vanquish25]

Yah know hopefully stuff like this isn't still going on, its hard to believe officials at Ford could even think about cutting out safety measures to improve costs, this is just sickening.

[jinushaun]

Wow. Ford shown to cut corners again in the name of saving a few pennies!

[Nocturn_Bird]

As much as I hate to side with ford, its not like GM and DCX arn't doing the same thing. Corporations bottom line is always the profit margine, and nothing else.

[mbukukanyau]

Its impossible for a company to get a fair hering in the US infront of a Jury... I say Fords Jury should be of its peers... other automakers Engineers

[SVT2888]

This is becoming like the tobacco lawsuits.

[barcodedorganic]

Originally Posted by Nocturn_Bird

As much as I hate to side with ford, its not like GM and DCX arn't doing the same thing. Corporations bottom line is always the profit margine, and nothing else.

tell me how they're doing the same thing.

[nailhead425]

Originally Posted by barcodedorganic

tell me how they're doing the same thing.

Rather than installing Airbags, GM put those gawd-awful seatbelts in the doors.

[Erunion]

Dont roll your SUV, Moran.

/to the dead woman

[MN12Fan]

It doesn't matter how strong any company makes their vehicles, tragedy in one of them is an inevitability. The Explorer may have a large occurrence of deaths but it is also, now as well as then, the number one selling SUV of any kind. Of course more people are going to get killed in them because there are more of them out there; the odds are simply greater. Besides, if the Explorer is so "unsafe," it must not be a big deal to the vast majority of its buyers.

I can never take stories like this seriously. They may be tragedies, and improvements may need to be made too, but you're talking about occurrences that are statistically nonexistant relative to the total amount of vehicles that are out there. Instead, you have the media there to tell us how the world's going to end because of these problems and lawyers who are there to blow things out of proportion to make more money on a case.

What's the alternative? "Make the vehicles safer," of course, but where does it stop? Does the Explorer have to be made more durable than an M1 Abrams tank before it's considered good enough? It sounds ridiculous but what does Ford have to do in order to satisfy everyone while keeping things affordable still? Just look at the circumstances of this occurrence. This woman was forced to avoid a drifting RV in her Explorer. Okay, just look at that one point. What if the woman plowed right into the RV? This article would probably be talking about the Explorer's inability to survive collisions with 10,000 pound vehicles and how it's so wrong for Ford to allow that. Look at the next thing, her hitting the "bump" in the road. Presumably, the bump caused her to lose control. Is a bump in the road the responsibility of the Ford Motor Company? And then, tying both of these things together, their's her speed. Did anyone notice how the author conveniently omitted the approximate speed the woman was driving at? If she was driving at 70MPH, suddenly swerved to avoid an RV (a big target to avoid I might add), and hit a bump in the road on top of it, causing her to lose control and crash, does it really matter what kind of vehicle she's driving?

[zonty]

Originally Posted by nailhead425

Rather than installing Airbags, GM put those gawd-awful seatbelts in the doors.

Yeah, those seatbelts were awful, but I believe they were the result of federally mandated passive restraints at a time when air bags weren't ready for prime time across all lines.

Some stupid people still refuse to belt up.

This Ford story has an eerie deja vu quality about it...remember the exploding Pinto gas tank? Ford internal memos (revealed in court) proved that Ford not only knew about the problem, but also knew how to make the cars safer with a .50 cent part. The lawyers and beancounters got together and did a cost/benefit/loss analysis and decided it would be cheaper to pay the lawsuits resulting from the inevitable deaths than to implement the new part. As a result, a bunch of people burned to death hideously and needlessly.

And of course, more recently, there's the exploding Crown Victoria gas tank, responsible for killing and horribly burning many police officers as well as who knows how many just plain folks. Again, we have to ask, what did Ford know and when did they know it?

And, finally, did we ever really get a straight answer about the rash of Explorer rollovers riding on supposedly defective Firestone tires? Ford and Firestone pointed the finger at each other, of course, but was there ever a satisfactory resolution to that one?

[HOJIMAN2K3]

Originally Posted by SVT2888

This is becoming like the tobacco lawsuits.

Sorry, I have never seen a surgeon general warning on an Explorer

[HOJIMAN2K3]

Originally Posted by MN12Fan

... Did anyone notice how the author conveniently omitted the approximate speed the woman was driving at? If she was driving at 70MPH, suddenly swerved to avoid an RV (a big target to avoid I might add), and hit a bump in the road on top of it, causing her to lose control and crash, does it really matter what kind of vehicle she's driving?

I know the Volvo would have been fine

[jarsworldcom]

Originally Posted by barcodedorganic

tell me how they're doing the same thing.

I know how from first hand experience. They don't always let the engineers fix the problem due to cost so they use a zip tie to fix it.

[jokuvaan]

Automakers just need to put stick that there is big rollover risk and that vehicle is very unsafe, own liability.

There has always been and always will be people who either dont have money or dont want to pay for safety in cars.

And even those who refuse to accept that safety levels are very different in different vehicles.

Safety sells surprisingly poorly when you think how important it is.