An old Court TV's Forensic Files

[Joe771476]

I think I posted this before, but I just noticed something that I did not notice the last time.

I missed the very beginning of the episode but apparently a woman died in an early to mid-80's Mercury Cougar that her daughter was driving. The daughter left the car -- I'm not sure why --and it rolled down an embankment and caught fire. She was unable to get her mother out and an autopsy determined that she had not inhaled smoke BEFORE she died and that she presumably died from cardiac arrest. The daughter was initially convicted based on the prosecutor's case that an accelerant had been used AND that insurance money was the motive. But then a fire analyst (didn't catch his name) got involved and knew that 8 million Ford vehicles had been recalled due to the fact that these switches were defective causing about 8000 fires. The Supreme Court overturned her conviction after she served 10 months, when this fire investigator put a torch to the steering column and it melted, creating an accelerant of liquid plastic which fell on the seat and carpet accelerating the fire. Interestingly Ralph Newel, a Ford employeee at the time was a witness for the prosecution in the court proceedings and the switch problem was never even mentioned! In fact he was on the investigation team concerning these switch related fires! Now this Cougar did not fall into the years of recall, but this unnamed fire analyst suspected that this older model Cougar still had a defective switch. But here's the clincher. When they showed the switch from a recalled car and a switch from a non-recalled car, I could swear the NUMBERS matched but the first 4 LETTERS did not! One was something like EADE-11842 DE (that's a guess) but the other had a different second letter (in other words like EQDE-11842 DE). So my question is: Is it basically the same switch?

[theoldwizard]

So my question is: Is it basically the same switch?

Yes

 

I discussed this once with a warranty analysis guy. He said even though the same switch was used on many different models of many years, only certain models and model years were recalled. This was because only those models and years showed "above average" failure rates.

 

The government approved this action. Go figure.