Automotive Lawsuit History Unearthed, Junkyard Style: The Ford Park-To-Reverse Warning Label
For decades, I’ve been seeing Ford-family vehicles with ugly, pointless warning labels stuck to their instrument panels: Unexpected and possibly sudden vehicle movement may occur if these precautions are not taken. I’d always assumed that these were ex-rental cars, but after I mentioned the warning stickers in this week’s ’75 Ford Maverick Junkyard Find post, several readers pointed out that the stickers were the result of Malaise Era litigation. Of course!
It turns out that many Ford automatic transmissions of the 1966-1980 period developed a tendency to slip from Park to Reverse, on their own, leading to lots of unpleasantness (if we are to believe Ralph Nader’s Center For Auto Safety, this problem caused 6,000 accidents, 1,710 injuries, and 98 fatalities). Since we’re talking about something like 23 million vehicles here, Ford resisted launching the biggest recall in automotive-industry history; the DOT agreed in 1980 to have Ford send out warning labels to the 23 million affected owners. Some of them used the stickers, most didn’t, and we still see them from time to time in junked Fords, Lincolns, and Mercurys. So, another bit of junkyard-learned Malaise Era automotive history, a nice chaser to the story of the FLOOR TEMP warning light.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Back in high school a friend inherited his grandmother's baby blue 1969 Thunderbird. He was following me one night and rear-ended me - just a tap but we pulled into a corner gas station to look. He hopped out of the T-bird with the engine running and as he was closing the door, it slipped into reverse and started doing a reverse U-turn out into the street. He hung on to the door and was screaming STOP!! over and over until he finally had to let go. The car did a full circle before wedging itself between a light pole and a standpipe while we watched in horror. Scraped up both sides of the car something awful. His father was not pleased. The repair bill on that was much higher than the $250 to repair the rear bumper on my dad's station wagon.
My mentor in performance engine work told me, "You can't babysit the world". Case in point: I heard, on a radio show about cars, a man complaining that he wanted to sue the maker of the car he had been driving. He had destroyed the outdoor deck at his parents house. Twice. When he parked in their, downhill, driveway he did not put the car in park or apply the parking brake. The car later rolled into the deck supports collapsing it. His basis of a lawsuit was that you could remove the key from the ignition switch/lock without having the car in park. Seems this was a car before the early 90s when this interlock became mandatory. I wanted to shout through the radio, "Like dude you should use the parking brake or it could be a major bummer man". The discussion continued centering about how to remember to put the car in Park. The parking brake was never mentioned. "Heavens to Murgatroyd Rocky!"