The driver of this 1998 Lincoln Town Car
was severely injured and her young daughter
killed when the cruise control actuator
cable caused the throttle to remain open
as she was trying to bring the vehicle to
a stop.

Ford's Fatal Cruise

Millions of drivers and occupants of Ford cars, trucks and SUVs today are at risk of losing control of their vehicles and being involved in deadly high-speed crashes as the result of defects in the design of the electronic speed control ("cruise control") systems employed in Ford vehicles.  For the past two decades,  Ford Motor Company has reaped huge profits from selling the popular cruise control system as an option to customers without warning them about what Ford has known: that the speed control system in their vehicles could fail in a variety of ways and cause an out-of-control acceleration, leading to severe injury and death.

Ford's engineers have admitted that their speed control system can

(1) misinterpret electronic signals generated within the vehicle and suddenly accelerate without any driver input;

(2) react to externally-generated radio transmissions and suddenly go out of control; and

(3) fail to disengage or allow the throttle to return to idle when the driver is attempting to slow down or stop, suddenly working against and sometimes overpowering the driver's braking action.

In one case, a Hertz lot attendant at an airport facility got into a Lincoln Town Car that had just been returned by a customer, intending to drive it through the car wash.  He turned on the ignition.  The instant he put it into "Drive," the Town Car roared off and careened into several other Hertz vehicles and a building.  He swore that he had his foot on the brake when engaging the gear, as he had done with hundreds of other Ford vehicles in the Hertz lot that week.  He was fired from his job.

1998 Lincoln Town Car

A Secret Service agent on official duty near the Vice-President's home in Washington, D.C., got into a Ford Crown Victoria, intending to move it only a few feet, when suddenly it accelerated out of control, in reverse.   "I didn't know what was going on," he recalls.  "I hit the brake immediately, and at that time the brake didn't seem to stop the vehicle.  ...[T]he tires were squealing, and right behind me was a rail, and the car backed up into it, putting itself on top [of the rail]."

A mother and her 14-year-old daughter were returning from a shopping trip and were turning onto an exit ramp from an Interstate highway.  Both were secured in their seat belts in their 1998 Lincoln Town Car, and the vehicle's cruise control was engaged.  As the driver stepped on the brake to slow down, the cruise control actuator cable stuck in the open throttle position and would not allow the engine to return to idle.  Instead of responding to the driver's frantic braking, the Town Car left the road at a high rate of speed and crashed into a rock embankment.  The mother received severe, permanent injuries and her daughter was killed. 

When victims of these sudden-unintended-acceleration or stuck-throttle events have complained to Ford, the automaker has invariably blamed the driver, alleging that the driver must have pressed the accelerator or allowed the floor mat to interfere with its operation.  When victims have asked the National Highway Safety Administration to investigate, the agency has relied almost exclusively on Ford's explanations and statistics and has accepted Ford's denial that there is a design defect.  The result has been that the in-depth investigation of these design defects and ultimate justice for the victims has fallen upon the shoulders of experienced plaintiffs' lawyers willing to expend the time, energy and money necessary to expose the true facts and circumstances and hold Ford Motor Company accountable.

In recent litigation, Ford has been required to disclose documents that revealed the breadth of the problem (almost no Ford vehicle is exempt, and failures have been reported in such popular models as the Taurus, Explorer, Mercury Marquis, Crown Victoria, Lincoln Continental and F-Series pickup trucks), the company's prior knowledge of the cruise control design defects and its efforts to keep them hidden.  Ford today is finding it difficult to hide behind its decades-old strategy of claiming that "these failures don't occur in the real world" in the face of hundreds of highly-credible victims (including Secret Service agents and police officers) who have come forward and testified about their horrific experiences when the Ford vehicles they were driving suddenly took off on them or failed to respond to a braking command.  As a result, victims are winning their cases against Ford.

(03/27/02)