2006 Navigator Ultimate - bad engineering
I've been really disappointed in the bad engineering (I'm a professional engineer and car enthusiast) that went into the design of this vehicle, and even more disappointed by Ford's attitude of not backing up their bad product. One example: the power running boards both failed at ~70K miles, while STILL UNDER EXTENDED WARRANTY. A design flaw in the mounting brackets caused ALL FOUR brackets to fail within a few months. The bracket is aluminum, the chassis where it mounts to is steel. You will remember from high school chemistry that there is an effect called "accelerated galvanic corrosion" that occurs when dissimilar metals are in contact. If you do a Google search about this issue, there are many folks who have had this issue, yet FORD refuses to acknowledge the issue, and worse REFUSED TO FIX IT even when my car was still under FORD EXTENDED WARRANTY. Never buying another of their products again (have been a long time Ford customer - have owned Ford products for the last 30 years). Another repeated issue is with the heated seats. The electrical circuit to the seats failed multiple times and was replaced 4 times (luckily FORD covered this under warranty). Ignition coils in this car failed one after the other; I think I had 6 out of 8 coils fail within a year of each other. Each one cost be $100 (deductible on extebded warranty). Once it failed within 2 miles of leaving the dealership where they had replaced it with a new one! One of the coils failed multiple times. Come on FORD, this isn't Rocket science. Another issue is the overdrive mechanism. A short under the car (next to tail pipe), caused the overdrive to stop working intermittently for months. Was in the shop multiple times before they found the root caused. All these are just poor engineering.
Verified Owner
