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New F150 Erupts in Flames as Ford Truck Fires Rage On

More than 10 million vehicles recalled but fires continue

By Joe Benton
ConsumerAffairs.com

September 18, 2007
Here is yet another horror story about an all-too-familiar sight -- a Ford truck erupting in flames. This Ford truck created a fire that could have turned deadly.

Julie from Willits, California tells the story of how her brother-in-law's 2007 Ford F150 caught fire in his driveway and burned to the ground.

“He just brought his brand-new baby girl home 3 hours before,” Julie wrote. “We were all sleeping in the house, when my sister woke to some sort of lights outside. She went to the window she saw the Ford engulfed in 100-foot flames,” Julie told ConsumerAffairs.com.

Julie's husband ran outside and tried to put the fire out with a garden hose.

“By the time the fire department got there, the truck was a pile of ash,” she wrote. “If my sister would have never woke up, we could not even be here today because the truck would have caught the house on fire.”

10 million recalls

Ford has recalled more than 10 million vehicles but reports of fires in Fords old and new continue to roll in.

Frank in Universal City, Texas lost his 2001 Ford truck to a fire just two days after the Willits fire.

“My 2001 Ford F150 SuperCrew pick-up truck started on fire after having sat in my driveway for five hours. The fire, though attended to quickly by our fire department, consumed the engine, engine compartment, firewall, and front-end. The truck was in my driveway and the fire also affected my home,” Frank wrote us.

His truck is a “complete loss and there is approximately $5,000 damages to our house,” Frank said.

In Lonedell, South Dakota, Susan was in her third-floor bedroom when her 1997 Mercury Grand Marquis caught fired and burned the garage. “The car had only been moved out of the garage once that day for sweeping. Ended up being a 7-alarm fire,” she wrote ConsumerAffairs.com.

Susan said she was not aware of the recall to fix a faulty cruise control switch in the Ford Motor Co. product.

In the latest recall in August, Ford recalled as many as 3.6 million cars, trucks and vans because a switch that deactivates the speed control can overheat and catch fire, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The agency warns in its recall notice that the switch problem can cause a fire under the hood, hardly news to the hundreds of Ford owners whose vehicles have done just that..

The latest recall covered 16 brands of cars, sport utility vehicles and trucks from model years 1992 to 2004.

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