Ford Falcon 2008 Problems

YOU have been treated shabbily by the dealer and by Ford. You should not have to pay for the work the dealer has to do to remove the broken plugs. His mechanic broke them; he should have to pay to fix them. It is a problem with the three-valve V8 engine, and there are many thousands of reports of the problem with the engine in the US. I can understand your frustration.

THERE will still be a station wagon and a ute in the next Falcon range, but the Territory was always planned as a family four-wheel-drive and not a workhorse. So, sorry, there will be no Territory ute. And the Crewman lost money for GM Holden and has been discontinued, leaving the four-door ute field to the Japanese imports.

UNTIL we see the new Falcon it's hard to say if your complaints will be addressed. Fords have always tended to have a high seating position, which means tall drivers can have problems. As for the E-gas engine, my experience is it's inconsistent. I have had road-test cars that drove and performed well and others that had all of the problems you describe. I hope Ford will adopt the more modern gas-injection technology and dump the old system it has used until now.

FORD uses old technology on its E-Gas engine, claiming that's all its customers are prepared to pay for. It's cheap, but not necessarily nasty. Being old technology, it's prone to the old LPG issues of backfiring, stalking, stumbling and idling roughly, but kept maintained it does a good job. It's a dedicated LPG system so there's only one tank, but the spare wheel is mounted on the floor of the boot, reducing the space. Performance is down on the petrol compared to the petrol engine; the gas engine in the new FG has 156 kW and the petrol 195 so you can imagine the E-Gas car doesn't go as hard as its petrol cousin.