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Ford workers break their silence on faulty transmissions: 'My hands are dirty. I feel horrible'


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3 hours ago, silvrsvt said:

 

My wife was involved in an accident when we lived in MD-She was at a light, got rear ended and pushed into a F-150 in front of her.

 

The driver of the F-150 said he was ok.

 

We moved back to NJ and about a year and half (almost 3 years after the accident I think) I get served with papers by a court employee of the old county we live in (I could have missed it completely if I met up with her in AC that night, but I was tired from traveling previously that week) that required her to go down there for the court case.

 

Make a long story short, she was excused from the case, but it was just a major PIA because it required 4+ hours of travel time for about 20 minutes of court time...the guy in the F-150 was trying to look for a pay day and the window for suing people was coming up...a lawyer must have reached out to him. 

 

I was in two different accidents within months of each other (I was hit both times), and both times a few days later I got all sorts of calls from lawyers asking if I was hurt and needed a lawyer.  I was like no I wasn't hurt and get an immediate *click*.  I would never think of trying to go back and sue for something that didn't happen.

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Generally Class Action lawyers are different than Accident Lawyers. 

 

Accident Lawyers take individual cases involving injury - yea the advertising is over the top, but if McDonalds and Absolut Vodka can advertise why shouldn't these lawyers?    Perhaps if Insurance companies were more honest on payouts these lawyers wouldn't be needed.   

 

Class Action lawyers?    Is this the thread to be critical of them on?     Without Class Action lawsuits it would be practically impossible to sue over this F -ck Up by a culture of its too late or too expensive to fix it .     It wouldn't be practical to sue Ford over one or two cars because the litigation costs would be too high for a lawyer to take on.   The number of depositions needed to piece together what happened by it self would requires a huge outlay of money.  In this case the Class Action was necessary to correct what appears to be a serious problem in Ford's design or corporate culture - at least in this silo of the company.    

 

Personally I have little sympathy for Ford on this one since their refusal to adequately address the problem contributed greatly to the demise of the Focus and reinvigorated the Fix Or Repair Daily folks.   

Edited by Fordowner
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16 minutes ago, Fordowner said:

Class Action lawyers?    Is this the thread to be critical of them on?   

 

No sir, I am not critical of class action lawyers and lawsuits, including the cases involving Ford DPS6 and 10R80 transmissions. I do acknowledge what jasonj80 mentioned about costs imposed by litigation to products and services that consumers buy every day. I own a small business and know this well. To me, it's a cost of doing business in the USA.

 

At the same time, class treatment of claims is an important component of common law jurisprudence in our country. In many situations, the "aggregation" associated with a class action is the only way to impose the costs of wrongdoing on the wrongdoer, thus deterring future mistakes.

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Big difference between advertising to assist someone dealing with an insurance claim and practically begging them to fake injuries to get money they don’t deserve.  The ads say things like “big trucks have big insurance policies so if you’ve been hit you can get a big check”.  And we all know how they use chiropractors and doctors.  It’s completely unethical.  If someone needs an attorney they’re easy to find.
 

Same with class action lawyers that take frivolous lawsuits in the hope that one of them will pay off.  Most end up with the attorneys getting millions and the plaintiffs getting peanuts.

 

I have no issue with attorneys taking legitimate cases.

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Back on topic, I am very much a Ford fan. I’ve met a lot of great folks that work for Ford and my career for 19 years was excellent and I’m grateful. 
However, for some reason Ford’s Brass makes penny wise dollar foolish decisions. They are stuck in the same cycle. They don’t learn from past mistakes. Pinto comes to mind. Multiple door latch problems over multiple years and models. 
 Evidently the higher ups don’t want to hear the truth. It’s scary to think these people were afraid to tell the truth because of retaliation . 
Something is wrong and it’s starts with the top. 
Do the white collars not have a sense of Right and wrong? 
Do what’s ethically right and most the time you will be rewarded in the long run. 
They should have spun this and offered original owners a crazy deal to trade into another Ford.

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1 minute ago, Deanh said:

in New Zealand theres a bounty on them....lol..

 

My wife is making a disability claim at the moment, she suffers from advancing Multiple Sclerosis

By the time the lawyers are done, they take around 60% of her payout in fees and charges.

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Ford deserves every bit of flack for these piles of crap. We were an all Ford family until my parents bought my sister a new 2012 Focus as a graduation present and the transmission was a pile, now driving Honda’s and Nissan’s. 

I will say Mom’s old 2009 Fusion is still a spare at parents house and has been pretty much bulletproof with 100k on it.

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11 hours ago, akirby said:


The Brits get some things right - they don’t allow attorneys to advertise on TV.

We have one ambulance chaser deluxe who makes regular ambulance chasers look downright respectable by comparison. He actually has one commercial that rolls mesothelioma, military ear plugs, car wrecks, prescription meds, and tight underwear into one giant ball of vile suckitude. 
 

Makes one yearn for the days when neither drug companies nor lawyers could advertise on TV...

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13 hours ago, fordtech1 said:

Back on topic, I am very much a Ford fan. I’ve met a lot of great folks that work for Ford and my career for 19 years was excellent and I’m grateful. 
However, for some reason Ford’s Brass makes penny wise dollar foolish decisions. They are stuck in the same cycle. They don’t learn from past mistakes. Pinto comes to mind. Multiple door latch problems over multiple years and models. 
 Evidently the higher ups don’t want to hear the truth. It’s scary to think these people were afraid to tell the truth because of retaliation . 
Something is wrong and it’s starts with the top. 
Do the white collars not have a sense of Right and wrong? 
Do what’s ethically right and most the time you will be rewarded in the long run. 
They should have spun this and offered original owners a crazy deal to trade into another Ford.

 

If the story as depicted is accurate, then we have Ford management behavior as egregious as VW management with dieselgate. 

 

Frankly, I don't have any reason to doubt your description from the story. I see it all the time within my own company, and within companies with which I do business. It's endemic anymore in business, and it's the rare company that operates with concern for its customers and employees as being as/more important than next quarter's results and this year's bonus check.

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1 hour ago, Harley Lover said:

 

If the story as depicted is accurate, then we have Ford management behavior as egregious as VW management with dieselgate. 

 

Frankly, I don't have any reason to doubt your description from the story. I see it all the time within my own company, and within companies with which I do business. It's endemic anymore in business, and it's the rare company that operates with concern for its customers and employees as being as/more important than next quarter's results and this year's bonus check.


This behavior is prevalent in older companies especially.  These middle managers grew up in that culture and it’s not easy to change.  You have to start at the top and make it clear to every management level that behavior won’t be tolerated.  You have to be willing to punish the ones that continue doing it.  I worked for a VP who worked that way.  You knew you had to bring up bad news as soon as you knew about it and you were expected to escalate if anyone tried to hide it.  And if you didn’t you’d be looking for a new job.  It was that simple.  
 

Not sure if Hackett feels that way or not but if he doesn’t demand honesty from his direct reports it probably won’t happen or at least it won’t happen consistently.

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9 minutes ago, jpd80 said:

As the new broom,  Jim Hackett had a perfect opportunity to do something about this issue but chose not to.

 

 

 

 

 

Eh, all of those decisions were made well before he came in. It's hard to say whether or not he was made aware of anything involving this. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. 

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9 minutes ago, fuzzymoomoo said:

 

Eh, all of those decisions were made well before he came in. It's hard to say whether or not he was made aware of anything involving this. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. 

Could it have been brushed over as an ongoing warranty issue that was being dealt with by TSBs?

No need to escalate because the situation was being handled?

 

I do recall Mark Fields trying to pin this on Joe Hinrichs and tried to fire him,

maybe JH made some decisions at his level to deal with the DP6S that were

never going to fix the problem and then Ford was stuck with it.

Edited by jpd80
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7 minutes ago, jpd80 said:

Could it have been brushed over as an ongoing warranty issue that was being dealt with by TSBs?

No need to escalate because the situation was being handled?

 

I do recall Mark Fields trying to pin this on Joe Hinrichs and tried to fire him,

maybe JH made some decisions at his level to deal with the DP6S that were

never going to fix the problem and then Ford was stuck with it.


I don’t think so.  Sounded like the managers were determined to meet their price goals and just ignored the engineers until it was too late and too expensive to fix it easily.   They should have simply bit the bullet and replaced it with 6f35 and gave owners a special incentive to trade it in and extended the warranty to 150k.

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13 minutes ago, jpd80 said:

I do recall Mark Fields trying to pin this on Joe Hinrichs and tried to fire him

 

I remember hearing the same thing. I think it was actually pioneer that first mentioned it here. 

 

 

3 minutes ago, akirby said:


I don’t think so.  Sounded like the managers were determined to meet their price goals and just ignored the engineers until it was too late and too expensive to fix it easily.   They should have simply bit the bullet and replaced it with 6f35 and gave owners a special incentive to trade it in and extended the warranty to 150k.

 

This seems like the most probable scenario to me. 

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8 minutes ago, akirby said:

I bet if those same mgrs were responsible for the warranty repair costs they probably wouldn’t have ignored the engineers.  

i remember Mulally getting fired up about Focus profitability when told it was a CAFE offset for larger cars,

so I'm wondering if his edict to make Focus profitable was fresh in manager's ears. Maybe this was a

situation where adherence to the CEO's directive set things in motion that came back to bite Ford.

 

That gearbox was never going to Work in Focus, the 2012 shold never have been built at MAP but

Ford took a government DOE loan and part of it was to assist in making that happen.

 

It's like a giant spider's web of conflicting interests pushing a project forward...

 

The right vehicle for MAP was the 2012 T6 Ranger but that was passed over

in late 2006 when Ford was in a very different place and fighting for its life.

Edited by jpd80
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On 12/6/2019 at 7:21 PM, jpd80 said:

My wife is making a disability claim at the moment, she suffers from advancing Multiple Sclerosis

By the time the lawyers are done, they take around 60% of her payout in fees and charges.


...that’s weird.  Around here disability is statutory and you get a statutorily defined % paid directly by the agency to the attorney with a cap on the payment (IIRC it’s around $6k). Last I checked, the max for SSDI was 25%.  Worker’s compensation is less, about 20%, I think. Usually statute tries to protect disability recipients from predatory practice.

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