The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated Monday it’s investigating whether or not Ford‘s 2022 recall of almost 49,000 Mustang Mach-E electrical autos sufficiently addressed points and whether or not extra autos must be included within the recall.
Ford recalled 48,924 of its 2021 and 2022 Mach-Es in June 2022 after issues that prime voltage battery predominant contactors might overheat from DC fast-charging and repeated wide-open pedal occasions. This may end in an instantaneous loss of propulsion energy and trigger an accident danger.
A battery predominant contactor is a high-current swap that controls the circulate of electrical energy between the battery and the automobile’s electrical methods, just like the drivetrain.
At the time, Ford issued a free on-board software program replace to repair the difficulty, after which a technical service bulletin to exchange the excessive voltage battery junction field on recalled autos. The software program replace concerned monitoring the contactor temperature and decreasing battery energy to stop injury to the contactor, and monitoring contactor resistance to search out an overheated contactor and scale back automobile energy to stop extra injury.
NHTSA has now opened a recall question into 64,000 Mach-E autos after receiving 12 shopper complaints about autos that had obtained recall fixes. One proprietor in California instructed the U.S. security regulator that the automobile had a second catastrophic failure of its excessive voltage battery junction field simply two days after receiving the software program replace.
Another Mach-E proprietor in Florida complained that shortly after charging at a DC quick cost station, the automobile’s display featured a pop-up message to “safely stop now.” The automotive got here to an entire cease seconds later within the center of a freeway on-ramp. The driver needed to wait a number of hours to restart the automobile and solely made it three miles earlier than the automotive stopped once more.