#recall

Going green shouldn’t lead to the appearance of orange flames, so Ford Motor Company wants you to bring your charging cord back to the dealer. A number of fires associated with the 120-volt factory charging cord provided with C-Max and Fusion plug-in hybrids, as well as the Focus Electric, forced Ford’s hand in the recall.

It seems some owners’ wall outlets aren’t the beefy piece of infrastructure Ford engineers assumed, but some owners can be faulted for using a cheap extension cord to “refuel” their environmentally sensitive ride.

A recall serious enough to necessitate the replacement of a car is rare, but Subaru should be glad it caught the problem before more faulty vehicles left the factory.

Over the course of eight days in July, 293 Ascents from the 2019 model year made it off the assembly line while potentially missing a full complement of welds — hardly something the automaker can just go back and touch up.

Tuesday was — accidentally, it turns out — all about the Ford Ranger, at least for those with no interest in Tesla and its business machinations. As we await the return of the midsize pickup’s online build and price tool, Ford is taking an unusual step to get old versions of the truck into the repair shop.

The automaker is offering dealers cash for every 2006 Ranger they can track down and pull off the road.

Automatic transmissions that shift into park but don’t actually end up in park are one of the greatest automotive sourges of our time. Of all automakers, Fiat Chrysler and Ford seem to have the worst luck with this.

On Wednesday, Ford Motor Company announced a recall of roughly 550,000 Fusions and Escapes to prevent the vehicles from getting loose, though some wonder why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration didn’t step in earlier to force the recall.

Following a March investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Kia Motors is recalling more than 507,000 vehicles in the United States to solve an electronic glitch that may prevent airbags from deploying in the event of a collision.

The NHTSA launched the probe after four people died in accidents involving Kia and Hyundai vehicles with airbags that failed to inflate. In total, the agency’s investigation noted failed deployments in the 2011 Hyundai Sonata and 2012-2013 Kia Forte in the U.S. There was also an incident involving the Forte in Canada.

Audi is recalling some 1.16 million vehicles worldwide, 342,867 of them in the United States, to prevent the risk of fire in several 2.0-liter models.

The issue stems from a component Audi’s had trouble with before: the coolant pump. According to the automaker’s engineers, the pump can either become blocked with debris from the cooling system or short-circuit from moisture within the pump. Regardless of the cause, an increasing number of reports of overheating pumps tipped Audi off that its earlier recall wasn’t enough.

Ford Motor Company is calling back nearly 350,000 trucks and SUVs in North America to prevent possible rollaway incidents. The issue — one we’ve grown used to as of late — involves drivers thinking they’ve shifted into park while the vehicle is actually still in gear.

However, this recall isn’t the fault of confused drivers not understanding their newfangled shift levers or dials. There’s a real, physical problem here.

It’s 11:40 a.m. Do you know how large your Camry’s pistons are?

Odds are you don’t, and Toyota isn’t sure it knows, either. That’s why the automaker has issued a small but relatively unusual recall for 1,730 Camrys from the 2018 model year. The issue lies with the installation of pistons built to an incorrect specification.

Essentially, they’re too big for their britches.

Tesla’s once sky-high share price has taken a serious hit in recent days, so news of the electric automaker’s recall of 123,000 Model S vehicles couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Describing the recall as voluntary, Tesla sent emails to owners of all Model S electric cars built before April 2016 to warn of an issue affecting the car’s power steering system. The issue involves corrosion impacting the bolts holding the power steering motor to the rack, which can then shear off — leading to a loss of power steering.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a probe into two older-model Kia and Hyundai vehicles in the wake of six head-on collisions, hoping to discover why the vehicles’ airbags failed to deploy.

Included in the investigation is the 2011 Hyundai Sonata and Kia Fortes from the 2012 and 2013 model years. The collisions reported by the safety agency resulted in four deaths and six injuries.

Mankind’s greatest foe — road salt — can never be fully vanquished, and the latest evidence of its malevolence just cropped up in 20 northern states. Salt, though essential to human life, turns water brackish and wreaks havoc on vehicles — just ask the owners of previous-decade Toyota Tacomas, Nissan Frontiers, and Mazda 3s.

We can now add the 2009-2012 Ram 1500 pickup to the list of vehicles with salt-sullied undercarriages, though this issue, for which Fiat Chrysler is recalling 270,254 vehicles in the U.S., doesn’t result in the vehicle breaking in half (or, in the case of the Mazdas, disappearing into brown dust).

Ford Motor Company has announced a recall of 1,378,637 vehicles for a very concerning problem: steering wheels that may come loose and detach from the steering column while the car is underway.

It’s a problem first investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year, but Wednesday’s recall spreads a wider net. Affected vehicles include Ford Fusion and Lincoln MKZ sedans built in the U.S. and Mexico over five model years. According to Ford, the problem stems from a key bolt that just can’t stay married to the threads.

We have a particular fondness for the unintrusive, non-gimmicky column shifter here at TTAC. They’re satisfying to shift, pleasingly retro, and free up space between the front seats for any number of things, including a seat. Column shifters also keep your eyes pointed straight ahead, instead of having them wandering around the console or bottom of the center stack, searching for that newfangled dial shifter or push-button array.

Sadly, the column shifters in more than 228,000 Ram trucks are an invitation to danger. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has announced a recall of so-equipped models in the hopes of preventing rollaway accidents.

After alerting drivers of nearly 3,000 2006 Ranger pickups last month, Ford Motor Company wants the owners of another 33,428 trucks to stop driving their vehicle, get out, and walk away.

The vehicles involved in this latest “stop driving” order are, like the other crop, all presently under recall for a potentially deadly airbag defect, though recent tests show they could be especially dangerous in the event of an airbag deployment. Ford singled out the earlier group of vehicles after discovering a connection between two airbag-related deaths in the United States. The unstable Takata airbag inflators found in both vehicles, which detonated and sprayed both crash victims with metal shards, were assembled on the same day.

These 33,428 Rangers could be equally dangerous, the company says.

Some 2,900 Ford Ranger pickups from the 2006 model year pose such a high risk to their owners, Ford Motor Company wants those people to stop driving them immediately. So great is the concern, Ford is recalling vehicles already named in an earlier recall, just so it can identify who the owners are.

Of the 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries reported from exploding Takata airbags, only two fatalities occurred in vehicles not built by Honda. A Ranger airbag explosion in 2015 killed a female driver. Now, the automaker claims it has discovered the July 2017 death of a West Virginia driver was also the result of a Takata inflator — and that both victims’ inflators were manufactured on the same day.