Seven years worth of Ford Motor Co’s most popular sports utility vehicle (SUV) model are a step closer to recall in the US over mounting reports of exhaust fumes leaking inside.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has taken an interim step toward prompting the recall of 1.3 million 2011-2017 Ford Explorers, including 2016-2017 Explorer Police Interceptor models, according to a posting on the agency’s Web site.
This comes more than a year after the agency first started looking into odors and exhaust issues in the vehicles.
The agency said on its Web site that it has upgraded the probe to an “engineering analysis” after receiving at least 2,719 complaints pertaining to those model year Explorers.
“Our decisions are driven by the data available,” Ford spokesman Michael Levine said in an e-mail on Saturday. “When the data indicates a safety recall is needed, we move quickly on behalf of our customers.”
Three crashes and 41 injuries have been potentially linked to the issue since July 1 last year, according to a filing by the agency.
Some cases included complaints of nausea, headaches and loss of consciousness, all symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning.
While the agency said it has not found substantive data to show that carbon monoxide was responsible for any of the incidents, preliminary testing suggested that carbon dioxide “levels may be elevated in certain driving scenarios.”
Last month, a police officer in Auburn, Massachusetts, reportedly passed out and crashed while driving a Ford Explorer SUV specially designed for law enforcement use. He tested positive for the noxious gas.
A Ford representative at the time told CBS News it would be “premature to draw conclusions” from the incident and said a closer analysis of the car revealed a carbon monoxide concentration of 13 parts per million.
The current permissible exposure limit established by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration is 50 parts per million.
Ford contended that aftermarket modifications were responsible for any carbon monoxide exposure in that incident, and the Auburn police later agreed in a statement on Facebook.
The company has said that carbon monoxide, which is odorless, has been an issue only in police models of the Explorer, while other incident reports cite exhaust smells.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
RSS