Their names were Billi, Ami and Caleb. She was a mother and a wife. Ami and Caleb were just 16 and 12 year old kids.

It hits close to home. Fords that go up in flames.

A 2002 Ford Expedition parked in Peter Romans' carport in Madison County, Ohio is suspected to be the cause of a house fire that killed a woman and her two minor children. Romans survived the fire and told investigators that the fire started in his parked Ford SUV according to The Columbus Dispatch newspaper a few days ago.

If you've got a Ford in your garage, you might want to park it on the street tonight.

Romans' Ford was one of over 9 million Fords included in a recall that started in 2005 but which dragged on and on because of the sheer quantity of vehicles involve and a shortage of parts. But most of all, federal regulators show no urgency to push Ford to get the job done faster.

Several homes have burned and people have died. Many believe a direct link exists between the fires and faulty cruise control switches that can overheat and erupt into flames. Years of recalls and fires involving Ford vehicles caused federal safety investigators to issue an extraordinary public warning that Ford and Lincoln and Mercury owners could have hidden fire hazards in Fords that have not been repaired.

A flaming Ford inferno hit a homeowner in Chisago City, Minnesota in January when her 2000 Ford Expedition “started on fire parked in our attached garage. We have now lost everything we owned,” wrote the Ford Expedition owner. “The home we built not even 2 years ago burned to the ground,” she said.

Ford says a parts shortage is delaying repairs of the fire prone cruise control system in the recalled vehicles until later in 2008. Meanwhile, they keep building new cars and trucks. There's something fundamentally wrong about a federal safety bureau that will let them keep selling new trucks without making them fix the old ones that are burning down consumer's homes.

If you've got one of the recalled Fords, take it to your nearest Ford dealer right away and tell them to disconnect the cruise control system immediately. If they tell you to just wait for the parts to come in, don't. Insist the dealer do it right then. Don't drive it home until they fix it.

We've blogged about this deadly defect before. These Fords will keep right on burning and people will keep right on getting hurt. Federal safety investigators should force Ford to notify each and every owner of the affected vehicles immediately. With their recall records, Ford can easily tell what vehicles have been fixed for the recall and what ones have not. All they need is someone to make them do it. Wimpy federal safety officials, catering to Big Business and big bucks, are costing lives.

Their names were Billi, Ami and Caleb. She was a mother and a wife. Ami and Caleb were just 16 and 12 year old kids.

Don't let it happen to you. If your Ford dealer gives you a runaround or any stall or delay, contact us or call us right away, 1-888-331-6422 Toll Free. We know what to do.

Here's a list of the affected vehicles.

1. 1993 – 2004 F150
2. 1993 – 1999 F250 (gasoline engine)
3. 1993 – 1996 Bronco
4. 1994 – 1996 Econoline
5. 1997 – 2002 Ford Expedition
6. 1998 – 2002 Lincoln Navigator
7. 1998 – 2002 Ford Ranger
8. 1992 – 1998 Ford Crown Victoria, Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car
9. 1993 – 1998 Lincoln Mark VIII
10. 1993 – 1995 Ford Taurus SHO with automatic transmission
11. 1994 – Mercury Capri
12. 1998 – 2001 Ford Explorer and Mercury Mountaineer
13. 2001 – 2002 Ford Explorer Sport and Explorer Sport Trac
14. 1992 – 1993 and 1997 – 2003 Ford E-150-350 gasoline or natural gas vehicles
15. 2002 – E-550 gasoline engine vehicles
16. 1996 – 2003 E-450 gasoline or natural gas vehicles
17. 1994 – 2002 F-250 through F-550 super Duty trucks (gasoline engine)
18. 2000 – 2002 Ford Excursion (gasoline engine)
19. 2003 – F250 – F550 Super Duty, Ford Excursion
20. 1995 – 2002 Ford F53 Motor home chassis
21. 2002 – 2003 Lincoln Blackwood

Don't let it happen to you. If your Ford dealer gives you a runaround or any stall or delay, contact us or call us right away, 1-888-331-6422 Toll Free. We know what to do.

We have to give the folks at ConsumerAffairs.com credit for creativity --- and accuracy too.
They just released their list of "Top Ten Automotive Outrages of 2007" and they hit the nail on the head.

Ford scores big with 3 of the "top ten" spots, for their flaming Fords (almost 11 million vehicles recalled since 2005), the Ford truck spitting spark plugs (an expensive non-warranty $3,000 repair) and the Focus ignition fiasco (a model with the worst recall record of anything on wheels since 1980). Those were so well known that they could be expected and have been long time big safety issues for the public.

Airbags that won't go boom when they should are the #1 issue. They reported on numerous accidents that should have caused air bags to deploy but didn't. While manufacturers say that airbags aren't supposed to deploy in all accidents (that's their excuse) we've seen some accidents that were so severe that common sense dictates the air bag should have gone off but it didn't. Even the experts are baffled and tend to just trust the science behind the system more than their instinct on this one. The odds are that the airbag issue will continue to be debated.

Then there's GM's truck brakes (nearly 1.4 million recalled), but worse still is the GM Onstar abandonment (built on a now-outmoded and abandoned technology, leaving hundreds of thousands of GM Onstar customers without any recourse at all).

While Jeeps that jump, the Prius unintended acceleration problem, and the BMW transmissions
are their own problem, the biggest issue we see? The federal safety department itself, Nhtsa.

Yes, folks, it's your tax dollars at work. Business as usual in Washington. Lobbyists in bed with the regulators. Lots of those slogans seem to fit the folks at Nhtsa nowadays and only a change in administration will change Nhtsa, an agency run by folks who seem to think that big money political donors matter more than peoples' safety.

These are the people who gave the okay for "geographic recalls" that allowed some defective vehicles to be driven around without their owners knowing of their defects, while requiring others to be recalled to fix the same defect, purely based on where you live.

They're the same folks who keep some defect safety investigation files secret, working hand in glove with big business. Yup, that's a great use of your tax dollars, folks...figure out the problem and then bury it away where no one can find it.

Although hounded by consumers and watchdogs, Nhtsa turned down a request to investigate the big Ford engines that dangerously spit out spark plugs, saying that "In the need to allocate and prioritize limited resources to best accomplish the agency's safety mission," they just couldn't spare the manpower and didn't think flying spark plugs was all that big a deal. (Federal Register, Vol. 60, No. 138).

That's because they weren't the ones who had to duck when the spark plugs went flying, no doubt.

The upper level management at Nhtsa gives direction and authority for the lower level safety investigators who do the real work. In short, for years the people at the top have been tieing the hands of the people at the bottom, hamstringing any serious effort to investigate some deadly
defects that pose serious risk and danger to the public.

It ought to be embarrassing. Instead, it's just business as usual on both ends of the phone line that runs between Washington and Detroit.

Well, if they won't help you, we will. If you've got a lemon, we'll help you get rid of it. Call (1-888-331-6422 Toll Free) or email us. Fighting back is what we do. It's what we've done since 1978. We're not going to stop now.