Ford's answers to the NHTSA 6.7 Investigation

hawkeye-08 wrote:

ricatic wrote:

No need to start thinking that the pumps are "on the edge". Bosch has told us that 460 scar fuel is the performance minimum for their pumps. With 520 scar fuel in the US, owners are already into the engineering margin...or have exceeded it. The fact that we have not had an epidemic of failures tells me we are well into the margin but not past the total failure numbers.

Regards

I agree that 460 scar is the requirement, but I also know the pumps will not fail immediately at 461 scar. There are engineering margins built into most everything properly designed so the real threshold is somewhat different than the 460 scar. Ford learned from the Navistar engines that if you outsource and your supplier denies warranty claims, you lose alot of money unless you also deny warranty claims. I would venture to say that Bosch is denying Ford warranty claims and Ford is in turn denying customer warranty claims. Problem is, it is not the customer's fault that the HPFP cannot handle the fuel available in the US.

This is certainly a ticking time bomb, Ford is gambling that it will be solved before it blows up and really hurts sales.

Remember the Hubble space telescope? The big mirror was ground wrong (seems there was a mix up in the measurements, something about metric vs SAE). I wonder if some Ford engineer signed off on the fuel system requiring 460 scar fuel because US fuel is 520 scar, thinking that 520 is better than 460, with greater than 10% margin...