On Mar. 4, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA) announced that it was launching an investigation into
brake failures of Ford's popular F-150 pickup trucks. The agency claims that nearly half a million 2013 and 2014
models could have brakes that suddenly fail completely. While no fatalities have yet been
associated with the failures, the NHTSA has received 20 complaints of this
problem in the last seven months, including four incidents that resulted in
non-injury crashes. Ford has
responded that it will cooperate fully with the investigation.
In the automotive industry, the F-150 is a legendary success
story. It is the single
best-selling vehicle in the U. S., and if Texas had a contest to name the state
automobile, the F-150 would win hands down. This is despite the fact that few F-150 owners routinely
carry a half ton or more of stuff in the truck bed. In other words, people buy pickup trucks for reasons other
than practicality. As any TV ad
for pickups will show, the automakers have spent millions to associate pickup
trucks with virility, toughness, and other he-man qualities. The Wikipedia article on pickup trucks
puts it this way: "In America
pickups are favored by low fuel prices, taxes and regulations that distort the
market in favor of domestically built trucks, and a cultural attachment to the
style." (I especially like
that "cultural attachment to the style.") Ford has parlayed this attachment into a huge share of the
U. S. automotive market, and with today's historically low fuel prices, the
popularity of pickups shows no sign of abating.
But stopping a vehicle that weighs up to 2 tons (1800 kg)
unloaded and more than 3 tons (2700 kg) loaded is no simple matter, so
power-assisted brakes are standard on these vehicles. Most brake boosters, as they are called, use a diaphragm
actuated by a partial vacuum taken from the intake manifold or other
source. When the driver applies
the brakes, this motion opens a valve that adds the force from the diaphragm to
the brake-pedal force, and applies much greater force on the hydraulic master
cylinder than one's foot can ordinarily supply. If the booster fails, the brakes still work, but it takes
much greater force for a given braking effect.
While it is too early to determine what may be going on with
the F-150 brakes, it's easy to see what could go wrong with such a system. Complaints to online auto-mechanic help
websites about F-150 brakes indicate that in several cases, the brakes totally
failed: the brake pedal went to
the floor and no braking happened.
When the vehicle was towed to the shop, no external signs of leakage
were found but the master cylinder had no brake fluid in it. That fluid had to go somewhere, and my
guess is that a seal broke or an accidental passageway was formed between the
master cylinder's high pressure and the vacuum in the brake-assist system,
sucking the fluid into the vacuum system of the power assist.
I have never worked on brakes more advanced than those in a
1955 Olds, and my idea of what is wrong with the F-150 brakes may be total
nonsense. But the NHTSA doesn't
think the complaints are nonsense, and now both Ford and the government are trying
to find out what's happening.
Besides this specific case, there may be something bigger
going on with regard to the way the NHTSA is treating consumer complaints. The Detroit
News quotes NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind as saying recently that we
are now in the era of the "Big Recall," which he says is not a good
thing. As anyone who has looked
into the matter knows, automakers are constantly fielding complaints of flocks
of problems of all kinds ranging from the trivial—interior trim that fades
oddly in sunlight, for example—to the deadly, like the GM ignition-switch
debacle I wrote about in this space in 2014. The problem the automakers face is to allocate their limited
investigative and engineering resources so that the truly dangerous problems
get addressed promptly—hopefully before anyone gets killed—and the less serious
ones are dealt with as time permits.
This is an art as much as it is a science, and historically the NHTSA
has limited its involvement to situations where fatalities were involved and a
serious defect could be identified.
The NHTSA's action in this brake-failure problem is not
unprecedented, but is unusual in that no fatalities or even injuries have been
reported in connection with the problem.
And the total number of complaints—about 30 in the last year—is not all
that large, considering the millions of F-150s out there on the roads. Perhaps this is the NHTSA's attempt to
head a problem off at the pass, so to speak, before anybody does get killed as
a result of an F-150's brake failure.
In any event, Ford has been called on the public carpet concerning the
issue, and they now have no choice but to come up with documents requested by
the government before April 20, or face large financial penalties.
Has Ford done anything wrong? That remains to be seen. The NHTSA's action falls into the category of what legal
specialists call "administrative law," which is in a kind of gray
area between laws explicitly passed by legislatures, and arbitrary and
capricious bullying by out-of-control government agency administrators. As federal agencies go, the NHTSA has
been fairly well-behaved compared to, for example, the Environmental Protection
Administration, which has landed in the U. S. Supreme Court numerous times for
what some say is vast overreaching of its statutory authority.
There are good reasons to treat a large corporation like Ford
differently than one would treat a private individual. And in using complaints from private
individuals to build a case against Ford, in that sense NHTSA is looking out
for the little guy. But it is easy
to imagine how the NHTSA could overdo the thing by pestering Ford about every
little complaint that could conceivably result in an injury. So far, they don't seem to be doing
that, but there is nothing except the integrity of NHTSA officials to keep the
agency from going overboard.
The best outcome of this situation will be if Ford finds a
definite cause for the brake failures and fixes it. This might involve a massive recall, but we are almost used
to those now. Even if millions of
F-150s are recalled, there is little chance that the American consumer will quit
buying his favorite pickup. The
NHTSA is no match for all those he-man pickup ads.
Sources: I referred to the articles on the F-150
brake problem carried on Mar. 4 by Autoweek online at http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/nhtsa-investigating-brake-problems-2013-14-ford-f-150
and by the Detroit News at http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2016/03/04/ford-investigation/81310176/. I also referred to the Wikipedia
articles "Ford F-series," "pickup truck," and "vacuum
servo." I blogged on the GM
ignition switch recall last year on Apr. 7, 2014 and June 9, 2014.
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