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Again? Ford issues second 2015 Fusion and Lincoln MKZ seat belt recall

In 2016, Ford issued a recall for 603,392 2013-2016 Fusions and 2013-2015 Lincoln MKZs due to potentially faulty seat belts. Apparently, that wasn't the end of it. Ford announced another recall this week for the same issue, this time covering 108,399 2015 Fusions and MKZs.  In both cases, the seat belt anchor pretensioners are the issue. According to Ford, "increased temperatures generated during deployment of the driver or front-passenger seat belt anchor pretensioner could degrade the tensile strength of the cable below the level needed to restrain an occupant." Basically, heat could weaken the seat belts, and in extreme cases, they wouldn't be able to keep up proper safety standards. Ford knows of at least one injury that has occurred due to this issue.   The recall includes 103,374 vehicles in the United States, 4,002 in Canada, and 1,023 in Mexico. Possibly affected Fusions were built at Ford's Flat Rock Assembly Plant between August 1, 2014 and January 30, 2015. The MKZs were built at the Hermosillo Assembly Plant between August 1, 2014 and November 21, 2014.  As a fix, Ford says dealers will add an extra coating to the seat belt pretensioner cable for protection from the heat. If this recall might affect your vehicle, call your local Ford dealership and use recall reference No. 19S25. This news comes after Ford recalled 1.3 million Fusions and MKZs in 2018 due to the possibility that the steering wheels could fall off. Fusions have also been recalled due to the risk of rolling away.

2016: The year of the autonomous-car promise

About half of the news we covered this year related in some way to The Great Autonomous Future, or at least it seemed that way. If you listen to automakers, by 2020 everyone will be driving (riding?) around in self-driving cars. But what will they look like, how will we make the transition from driven to driverless, and how will laws and infrastructure adapt? We got very few answers to those questions, and instead were handed big promises, vague timelines, and a dose of misdirection by automakers. There has been a lot of talk, but we still don't know that much about these proposed vehicles, which are at least three years off. That's half a development cycle in this industry. We generally only start to get an idea of what a company will build about two years before it goes on sale. So instead of concrete information about autonomous cars, 2016 has brought us a lot of promises, many in the form of concept cars. They have popped up from just about every automaker accompanied by the CEO's pledge to deliver a Level 4 autonomous, all-electric model (usually a crossover) in a few years. It's very easy to say that a static design study sitting on a stage will be able to drive itself while projecting a movie on the windshield, but it's another thing entirely to make good on that promise. With a few exceptions, 2016 has been stuck in the promising stage. It's a strange thing, really; automakers are famous for responding with "we don't discuss future product" whenever we ask about models or variants known to be in the pipeline, yet when it comes to self-driving electric wondermobiles, companies have been falling all over themselves to let us know that theirs is coming soon, it'll be oh so great, and, hey, that makes them a mobility company now, not just an automaker. A lot of this is posturing and marketing, showing the public, shareholders, and the rest of the industry that "we're making one, too, we swear!" It has set off a domino effect – once a few companies make the guarantee, the rest feel forced to throw out a grandiose yet vague plan for an unknown future. And indeed there are usually scant details to go along with such announcements – an imprecise mileage estimate here, or a far-off, percentage-based goal there. Instead of useful discussion of future product, we get demonstrations of test mules, announcements of big R&D budgets and new test centers they'll fund, those futuristic concept cars, and, yeah, more promises.

Oprah at it again, gives car away on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Oprah Winfrey loves giving away cars. Not only has she given Pontiac G6 sedans and Volkswagen Beetle retro-mobiles to everyone in the audience of her past show, but the other night on Jimmy Kimmel Live! she gave another car away to one lucky audience member, while yelling her now-famous line: "You get a car!"
Although the acting of Oprah and Jimmy Kimmel was obviously staged for this giveaway, the reaction from the woman in the audience was genuine shock as she found out that she had just won a new Ford Fusion Energi. Congrats!
Not to take away from what Oprah and Jimmy pulled off, but our cynical sides have to wonder if there isn't more than just a little coincidence that this giveaway took place on the same day that Ford announced a fuel economy reduction for the C-Max hybrid. You be the judge... Scroll down to watch the short clip from the episode.