Ford Motor Company has warned that some of its cars may have problems.
“The driver does not get a warning message or a sound,” Ford said in a filing with the government on Friday. If the car isn’t really in park and the parking brake isn’t on, it could keep moving, which “increases the risk of injury or accident,” the company said.
“Aside from problems in park,” Ford said, “the driver may also notice the defect if they try to shift to a normal gear and the car acts differently than it should.”
Ford said it knows of four reports of injuries that could be related to the problem.
Ford said that the possibly faulty part had already been recalled in a more targeted way, including in 192,000 Transit Connect vehicles last year.
Ford told the agency that this is the fifth recall the company has done because of this problem since 2018. Ford has called back nearly 1.4 million cars and trucks around the world because of problems with shift cable parts.
Ford said that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent it more information in April about problems drivers were having with the defect “that Ford did not know about before,” and that its analysis showed “a change in the consumer complaint data” that made it decide to take action.
The company said that the risk of failure was still low, but it decided to recall the remaining vehicles in North America that were still at risk. Ford says that the problem only affects 1% of the 2.9 million cars that have been called back.
Ford says that the part will be changed and a protective cap will be put on it.
The NHTSA says that this affects some Escapes from 2013 to 2019, C-Maxes from 2013 to 2018, Fusions from 2013 to 2016, Edge cars from 2015 to 2018, and Transit Connects from 2013 to 2021.
forcing the company to step up a recall effort by a lot.
Ford is calling back 2.9 million Escape, Fusion, C-Max, Edge, and Transit Connect cars from different years because of a possible problem with a part that connects the shifter cable to the transmission.
The company says that if that part, called a bushing, is broken or missing, the car might not shift into the right gear, and the driver wouldn’t know anything was wrong. This could be dangerous when the car is parked or being driven.
In a letter to the company on Tuesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that the car could “unintentionally roll away” and that the problem could also cause it to “move in an unexpected direction.”