well after almost four months my nightmare appears to be over. i picked up the car last night with what ford says is one of the new tops off the assembly line.

needless to say this will be the last ford i purchase. i expect to buy at least five new cars over the next 20 years so not only will ford loose that business but also my family business and the business of anyone who cares to listen to my tale. this was all avoidable if ford really cared about customer service but they don't. i made several very reasonable offers to resolve this all of which were ignored while ford continued to string me along.

if i were you i'd call ford national and the regional office today and every day. i'd be polite but firm in demanding an immediate buy back assuming you still want a ford. i'd also look into your state's lemon laws. if this had happened to me four months earlier my state's lemon law would have applied.

best of luck in whatever you decide...

 

I'm not sure how the lemon law would have applied...doesn't it have to be the same problem more than 3 times? I mean, if this top breaks, and you take it in again, they fix it, breaks again, fix it, breaks again - then I can see how it would apply. In any case, I'm not sure this really warrants never buying a Ford again. I mean, was anyone mean to you? Treat you like crap? If yea, then sure leave. What were your reasonable offers? They may seem reasonable to you, but maybe not to them. A buy-back is not going to be a reasonable solution, btw.

I think you should go take your car out with the top down on a nice cruise, and remind yourself why you bought the car. Yea, it sucks your top's been out of commish - mine was too - but that's really not Fords fault. They saw an issue and did everything they could to resolve it.

 

lemon laws vary from state to state. some as you note require a specified number of attempts to fix the problem. others have a specific period of time in which the problem must be resolve. many like my state have both options available to the consumer. there are several good web sites that give details by state.

actually FORD headquarters that suggested a buy back to the dealer as a reasonable solution. the dealer ignored it. since ford thought it was reasonable i'm not sure why it's NOT reasonable. dealers have great latitude to resolve problems including buy backs which they do all the time.

I don't care about someone being mean. the dealership first tried to replace the top with the same one that broke in the first place even though they knew ford was scrambling to remanufacture the part. at no time did they tell me that ford was in the process of producing the part again. where I come from that is misleading at best and more like a lie. getting them to reveal the simplest information was like pulling teeth.

I remember well why I bought the car. I thought $28000 would by me a reliable vehicle and service within reason, not a car that has a page long list of tsb's. there is a reason why ford is in its current state and why other manufacturers like toyota are dominating the us market.

 

I unerstand where you're coming from. But from you just said it sounds like you're more mad at the dealer. I'm just saying it's a shame to lost a member of the Ford and Mustang community because of a dealer. I can attest, there are some really really crooked dealers out there, hence the "stealer" nickname I've heard on here. I don't know if you read one of my earlier posts on this thread, but the first dealership I took it to tried to pass it off as a non-warranty item. What I didn't say with a later update is that I confronted the service manager about it later (after calling to see when I wanted to schedule a service, even though I never had it serviced there), he said - direct quote "yea, we figured you'd just submit it to your insurance company - we handle insurance and private funded repairs before warrnanty claims". So yea, seems pretty crooked to me.

 

What, if any, were the warning signs of it going wrong? Was it reluctant to raise / lower for a few time prior or was it a sudden failure?

 

Honsetly, no - I didn't notice anything. But like I said before, I had just bought the car used. I think they knew it was broken, but did a quick fix (pop the rivit through to hold it temp or something), but it's not like I could prove anything. It was fixed under warr. anyway though, so I'm really not complaining. It was like the third time I had put the top up. I was told it's best to have the car running when you do it though - something about regulating the power to the motors when on vs running off the battery - I guess a spike could cause too much tourque on the frame.

 

I also had no warning whatsoever. Interestingly enough, I also bought my car used in October of '06. It only had 5000 miles on it and I was a little leary about why someone would get rid of it so quickly. I'm wondering if it wasn't because of the top? Anyway, between October and July of this year, I put the top down every chance I got. There was never a problem at all. Then one day it just happened. I was raising itand heard a loud pop and turned around to see therails sticking up and the left side up and the right side down. As far as getting mine fixed, it was 1 month ago yesterday that I took it to the dealer. They are still telling me the parts are on backorder and can not give me an approximate ship date. I called Ford directly yesterday and plan on doing it daily until something gets resolved. I'll keep you posted.

 

Shoot, I never scanned in my "warranty invoice" that I got from Ford. I'll do that tonight when I get home from work.

One thing is interesting though - whenever I've had warranty work done on any car in the past - be it Ford, Acura, VW, BMW, etc, it always shows the "cost" associated with each repair; broken down between labor and parts and all. In this case, there were no prices - it all just said "warranty" next to it. Weird. I guess part of the reason may be because they had to farm out the labor, but still I'm suprised the parts weren't priced. Oh well. I'll try to get that uploaded tonight to help anyone out - I think it listed the TSB on there.

On another note, should I go back to the first Dealer I went to that said it was a non-warranty item and shove it in thier face? Okay, I'm really not like that - but I hate when people try to screw other people, and what they were trying to do was Insurance Fraud in my book.

 

it was a sudden failure just as described above. one person who looked at it said that he'd never seen that high of a tension steel bend like that.

one word of caution if your top was replaced before last week it is likely that it was replaced with the same part as the one that broke. supposedly I got one of the first "redesigned" parts as I was high on the back order list.

I would take it in to the mana
of the first dealer who tried to tell you it wasn't covered by warrenty. you seem like a nice person and i'm sure you'd handle it appropriately. they need to be called on this crap. if I did my job the way ford handled theirs over the past four months I would have been fired. that way you can also ask just what part they put in.

good luck.

 

Do you have a part number of the new part they put in?

Also, this may be a question for any convert. owner - do you have to pull down in the center to close it all the way? It stops with maybe a half inch gap between the windshield top and rthe convert top, then I have to pull down in the center the rest of the way.