Poor quality

My wife owns a 2014 Fiesta 1.0L Ecoboost bought new from Ford in Cape Town. The vehicle has done 130 000 kilometers and has been regularly serviced by Ford. Last month it had an overheating problem which was caused by a hose clip coming loose from the coolant bottle resulting in the loss of coolant. There is no warning of this happening.

It has since been established that this is a weak point and breaks off easily – something that should have been attended to by Ford or warned customers of by recall. This leads to a much bigger issue which is that the car overheats without warning. This in turn results in a blown cylinder head gasket and continuous overheating thereafter. Now, as this year model's engine is prone to overheating due to a design flaw as already confirmed by Ford UK, their customer repairs have been compensated by Ford UK. This of course is only right as this model has an inherent flaw as reported on the internet, and Ford UK has shown to stand by its products.

Ford SA however, is not interested at all. In addition the Service Manager at Ford NI City advises that the head gasket cannot be repaired and the engine has to be replaced at a cost of R120K. Now one would think, Ford SA would either have recalled this model to prevent this, and if not having done that, to admit to the fault and compensate their customer for the repair.

I supp**** Ford with all the details as here plus two links of the UK's findings on this model. Unfortunately they are not interested. All I got was a call from call centre personnel to try and get rid of the problem and who could not answer the real questions around this issue. I understand they are not qualified or senior enough to do so but then get someone more senior to handle it. Bad bad experience. Ford never again and that is for sure.