Ford is recalling its flagship Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle. Again.
This time, the recall affects roughly half of the nearly 100,000 Mustang Mach-Es sold, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company announced the move in a letter to dealers on Monday. Vehicles manufactured between May 27, 2020, and May 24, 2022 — 48,924 cars manufactured over two years — are being recalled because it’s possible the cars could overheat and lose power or fail to start.
(Here at The Western Journal, we continue to chronicle the developmental speed-bumps that electric vehicles face and the very real safety dangers they pose. Despite this, they’re being pushed as a panacea for carbon emissions by Democrats. We’ll keep pointing out why that simply won’t work — and you can help us bring America the truth by subscribing.)
The issue is with the vehicle’s battery contactors — a switch for the EV’s power circuit, according to CNBC.
The contactors can overheat and either preclude the vehicle from starting or (more worryingly) cause it to lose power once in motion.
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The vehicles can be fixed via a software update, but that update isn’t expected until next month. Dealers can still sell the car until the fix comes, but the vehicles cannot be delivered until the glitch is fixed, the Journal reported.
The software update to the “Secondary On-Board Diagnostic Control Module and Battery Energy Control Module” can either be done remotely via wireless or by bringing the vehicle into a Ford dealership, according to CNBC.
Ford has had a rash of serious issues with its cars this year, regardless of whether they’re electrified or not; the automaker has chalked up the most recalls of any major automaker thus far in 2022, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as reported by the Journal.
Just last month, for instance, Ford recalled roughly 39,000 SUVs after reports of under-the-hood fires.
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However, this isn’t the first problem with the Mustang Mach-E — even if it is the most serious.
The much-hyped Mach-E was first introduced in 2020. It shares little in common with the Mustang we’ve all come to know and love — that’s a sports car, whereas the Mustang Mach-E is a bulky crossover SUV — but it was supposed to put the automaker in the same league as Tesla.
For the most part, the vehicle has received a warm reception from the press, winning Car and Driver’s “EV of the Year” award in 2021. The cars certainly aren’t cheap, however, with the base price listed at $43,895.
The problems began last April when a limited number of the Mach-Es were recalled due to a fault in the electrical drivetrain that could theoretically “brick” the car.
The issue, according to tech site The Verge, was with the 12-volt lead-acid battery, which powers some of the Mach-E’s start-up systems. Because of a software glitch, the battery wouldn’t recharge when the vehicle’s main lithium-ion battery system was plugged in. For most owners, this meant having the car towed to a dealership if the battery ran out.
“It is possible to jump the 12-volt battery, just as you would jump-start an internal combustion car. But it’s not nearly as straightforward, especially because the battery is located behind the Mustang Mach-E’s front trunk, and the hood’s electronic latch is powered by the low-voltage battery,” The Verge noted.
“To first open the front trunk then, owners have to open a panel in the front bumper that contains two leads, which can be used to jump the front trunk’s electronic hood latch,” it said.
“Then they have to pull back a panel underneath the hood to find the battery — though even at this point, some owners have had trouble accessing the leads on the 12-volt battery and have cut through the vinyl to more easily jump-start the battery.”
Fun and easy. This was hardly backyard mechanic stuff, although Ford said it affected just a handful of cars. Just last month, however, there was a more worrying recall: According to Ford Authority, certain all-wheel drive Mach-E models from 2021 were recalled due to “an issue with unintended acceleration, deceleration and/or a loss of power.”
Again, this is a safety issue; any of those things can cause a crash. In this case, Ford Authority said, “the powertrain control module (PCM) functional safety software may fail to detect a software error.”
Now, roughly half of all Mach-Es sold over the past two years are being recalled for a battery contactor glitch, which could cause the vehicle to lose power in the middle of traffic. Not only that, but the fix apparently won’t be ready until next month.
Ford is hardly alone in EV teething issues, mind you. That said, the Mach-E is one of the highest-profile electric cars that’s been released over the past decade. While it’s certainly not in Pinto quality-control hell yet, the car is only two years old. A few more recalls like this and EV-curious customers will start taking a hard pass on what was supposed to be one of the most important cars to come out of Detroit in the 21st century.
