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September 26, 2002
Honorable Janet NapolitanoAttorney General of Arizona
1275 West Washington Street
Phoenix AZ 85007

Dear Attorney General Napolitano:

We appreciate your work to try to get Ford Motor Company to recall its Crown Victoria Police Interceptors (CVPI) for defective fuel systems which explode on impact. The Ford dominated Technical Panel is about to make recommendations on technical fixes. We strongly urge these fixes be tested independently to confirm they will protect police officers in the 80+ mph rear impacts in which occupants survive the crash forces only to burn to death. When Ford agreed to recall the Pinto in 1978, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) conducted its own crash tests at DySci in Phoenix that showed Ford’s proposed remedy was inadequate and required substantial changes to upgrade the fix before NHTSA would approve the recall. As shown in the attached chronology, Ford first came up with a plastic shield, longer filler neck and better gas cap that proved inadequate in NHTSA crash tests. All further Ford crash tests had NHTSA personnel on the scene. Ultimately, the recall remedy was substantially upgraded after more stringent car to car crash tests were conducted.

The need to do independent testing of any fix Ford proposes is all the more imperative because private companies have crash tested fixes available today that demonstrate these Ford CVPI can take an 82 mph rear impact from a full-size pickup without a fire. The independent crash test was performed last month by Goodrich Aerospace at its Hurricane Mesa Test Track, a military testing center in Hurricane, Utah. Using a pusher/rocket sled, engineers crashed a 1970 Ford F-100 pick-up truck weighing more than 4,000 pounds into the rear of a 1999 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (CVPI) equipped with both a Fuel Safe bladder and a Fire Retardant Panel (FIRE Panel). The pick-up impacted the rear of the Crown Victoria at 81.9 mph. Even though the CVPI contained real gasoline instead of non-flammable Stoddard fluid, there was no fire. Neither technology is radical or new. The bladder has been used in Ford’s own race cars while the fire retardant has been used for years in military planes and has been tested by the Bureau of Standards in passenger motor vehicles.

Although Ford has tried to mislead the public into believing the fire crashes in Crown Victorias are unsurvivable due to high speed, they are generally survivable because the Crown Victoria has so much crush space and strong seats to absorb the energy of the crash. By placing the fuel tank in the energy absorbing crush zone, Ford converts a survivable 80 mph trauma crash into a fatal fire crash. The location of the fuel tank in the crush zone makes it vulnerable to side and angled impacts such as the ones that killed Officers Jefferson Davis in Florida and Robert Neilson in Arizona. Such non-direct rear impacts makes it all the more imperative that there be independent crash tests with Ford’s proposed fix that replicate real world crashes to determine if the fix is adequate at high speeds.

With police officers and consumers dying across America in Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis and Town Car fire crashes, it’s time for Ford to do the right thing and recall all these vehicles just as Ford did with the Pinto in 1978. And just as NHTSA did in 1978, any recall proposed by Ford must be independently tested to confirm that it is a real recall that saves lives and not a sham recall that saves Ford dollars.

We would appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about this before you take a position on Ford’s proposed recall.

Sincerely,

Clarence M. Ditlow
Executive Director
Center for Auto Safety

Joan Claybrook
President
Public Citizen

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