Ford Problems

FIRSTLY, you have a responsibility to read and understand the warranty that comes with the new car, which covers it for three years or 100,000km, whichever comes first. There's no point arguing the toss later when the car is outside the time boundary of the warranty. Ford has also come to the party by covering part of the cost of the second repair, so they have honoured their part of the deal. That said I do have a problem with the way many car companies deliver service. They do seem to have an us-versus-them attitude once you've bought the car. You appear to have been messed around by the dealer who couldn't solve the issue with the gearbox.

YOU don't say whether it has throttle body injection or multi-point fuel injection, but it sounds to be a fuel-supply problem. It could be an intermittent fault with the fuel pump, or even a blockage in a filter or pickup. If it is the fuel-injected engine I'd have the injectors cleaned.

PHONE George Peake at Victorian Autogas (1800 620 945) or Mick Morabito at Eurogas (03 9783 8300). Both should be able to help you. Or you can go to the LPG Australian website for a list of accredited installers: www.lpgautogas.com.au

RUNNING on petrol once a month is enough to keep the fuel-system seals and fuel pump from drying out and possibly failing.

CONTACTING your dealer is the first thing to do when you have a problem. If that doesn't work, go direct to the company. Now you've done that, you need to enlist the help of a brake expert. Ask them to assess the noise and give you an opinion on what might be causing it. Armed with that information, go back to the dealer, and Ford if necessary, and seek a resolution.

REPORT your experience to the oil company involved and ask it to check the fuel being sold at the outlet. If there is a problem, it's unlikely to be with the petrol being supplied by the oil company. I'm sure the oil company involved would be happy to check the fuel to make sure its product is not being tampered with.

BY YOUR description of the DVD player etc I assume it has been modified, so I can't make any assessment of what the modifications might be worth. Your figure of $46,500 is way above what I would expect it's worth. I would put it at $25,000-$30,000.

I AGREE it seems like a common problem. Perhaps other readers who have had the problem could let us know of their experiences before we go to Ford for an explanation.

THE clunking is usually from the diff, which is a known problem on the XR6, but we've heard from another reader, Clyde Wolfenden, that Ford has a fix for this problem in the form of revised auto trans shift points. He reckons this fixed his car, so you might check with your dealer about having it done to yours.

THE Falcon is generally pretty good for valve recession, but it is hard to say when the head might need rebuilding. It depends of the type of driving you're doing, but I would think you'd get 150,000km or more out of it before it had to be rebuilt. A taxi would get more because it spends more time running fully warmed up than the average family car. Driving long distances won't hurt it. The valve wear would most likely be less for the same reason it's less on a taxi. Ford says its engineers reported a bent conrod caused by an engine backfire in one of its BA development cars, and for that reason it used the beefier XR6 conrods in the e-gas engine, so that's a possible problem on gas. It's more likely to be a problem on a vapour-mixer system, which is what Ford uses, than it is on a more modern gas injection system, which is less prone to backfiring.