Explorer owners have complained to federal officials about various symptoms they attribute to exhaust fumes and carbon monoxide.
The complaints, which cover vehicles built between 2010 and 2018, carry high stakes for the second-largest U.S. automaker. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating drivers’ claims in 2016, then expanded the probe a year later after saying it had “preliminary evidence” of elevated carbon monoxide levels in some driving scenarios. If NHTSA finds a safety defect, Ford would face the prospect of recalling more than 1 million vehicles, costing perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ford, which in January debuted a redesigned Explorer for the 2020 model year, says there’s nothing wrong with the previous version. “All of our testing to date has shown these vehicles are safe,” company spokesman Mike Levine said in a statement. “Ford’s investigation has not found carbon monoxide levels that exceed what people are exposed to every day.”
The claims aren’t easy to investigate. For one thing, hospitals and doctors seldom test patients for exposure to carbon monoxide—Henriksen’s test was rare. Also, the U.S. has no regulatory standard for how much of the odorless, colorless, toxic gas would create a health risk for drivers, and scientists say the answer varies depending on individuals’ health and age. And drivers say the seepage problem comes and goes, complicating attempts to verify their allegations.
NHTSA’s task includes evaluating both what might be causing the alleged defect and what sort of health risk is posed to occupants by any pollutants in the cabin, a subject that global experts have just begun to study in recent years.
The fact that the agency’s investigation is well into its third year is “extraordinary,” said Allan Kam, an independent auto-safety consultant who retired as a senior enforcement attorney at the agency in 2000. It may signal that the probe isn’t a high priority—or it may reflect resource constraints at NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigations, Kam said.
“It could be a serious problem,” he said, “and because it’s not like a crash where there’s an obvious impact or moment of danger, this is something that builds up over minutes but potentially could be very serious or deadly.”
Ford’s response to the claims has served to deepen some drivers’ mistrust. The company’s first attempt to quell the concerns—through repair instructions the company provided to dealerships in 2012 to respond to customers’ complaints—was followed by repeated updates and several additional instructions. Ford said it’s confident in its most recent repair campaign, which was offered in 2017 and is still in effect. Complaints have dropped dramatically since this latest effort, the company said, and the fix “effectively resolves the matter.”
And yet, for drivers like Bert Henriksen, it hasn’t. He now drives with a portable carbon monoxide detector in his Explorer, and he said it occasionally shows elevated levels of the gas. He invited Bloomberg News along for a ride.
There was very little sign of carbon monoxide during a 76-mile test drive near Henriksen’s home in South Lyon, Michigan, in January. One of two detectors in his vehicle registered only tiny amounts of the gas. The other showed zero.
“That’s the problem—it’s so sporadic,” he said. Ford twice sent engineers to examine his Explorer, Henriksen said, and they found no problem.
Explorer owner Dallas Haselhorst of Hays, Kansas, had a similar experience. Ford’s engineers twice found no issue with his vehicle, he said, even though his own carbon monoxide detector—which he attached to a third-row headrest after his wife said she smelled exhaust fumes—detected elevated levels every few weeks.
“It was a very frustrating experience,” Haselhorst said. “We knew what we were smelling.” Weeks would go by without any exhaust fumes or carbon monoxide readings and then both would appear, seemingly at random, he said. Haselhorst pressed his case nonetheless, and the company bought back his Explorer in December 2017.
In Henriksen’s case, Ford offered to buy his Explorer back after he sued the company under Michigan’s lemon law. He’s in the process of closing that deal now.
As of mid-2016, Ford had bought back roughly 100 Explorers from complaining drivers, according to federal records. “We have made buyback offers to certain customers as goodwill gestures,” Ford’s Levine said.
When it was introduced in 1990, the Explorer helped usher in an American obsession with SUVs, and Ford has sold more than 7 million of them. The fifth-generation Explorer arrived in the 2011 model year. The first complaints about exhaust fumes seeping into its cabin followed soon after.
One came from a Ford manager who was leasing an Explorer. Company engineers tested his vehicle and confirmed what they described as a slight exhaust odor under specific driving conditions: full-throttle acceleration while the climate-control system was in “recirculation” mode. Ford described those circumstances as outside “typical customer usage,” according to a letter the company sent NHTSA in August 2016.
Using recirculation mode created negative air pressure inside the cabin, which could draw in outside gases through gaps in the rear of the Explorer’s body, Ford’s letter said.
That letter didn’t address any potential flaws in the Explorer’s exhaust system itself, but records the company turned over to NHTSA indicate that Ford dealers found exhaust system leaks in roughly 50 Explorers between December 2011 and April 2016—all on vehicles with fewer than 100,000 miles.
That’s a “fairly high failure rate,” said Ed Kim, a senior analyst with industry consulting firm AutoPacific Inc. “These components should not be failing at such a high rate prior to reaching 100,000 miles.”
The records summarize about 2,300 warranty claims, and a Ford spokeswoman said the list of claims doesn’t represent an acknowledgement by the company that any of the vehicles had a safety issue.
The leaks were mostly found in the exhaust manifold and the catalytic converter, which in the Explorer are welded together to form a single part. Problems identified in the records included porous welds, cracks and poor fits with other components that allowed exhaust to escape before exiting the tailpipe. The reports indicate that installing new parts resolved owners’ complaints.
In a statement, Ford said its testing hasn’t found exhaust leaks “to be a contributor to the concern.”
Regardless of the cause, Explorers’ exhaust issues made national headlines in 2017: Police officers who used Explorers in California and Massachusetts tested positive for exposure to carbon monoxide. And police in Austin, Texas, pulled almost 400 so-called Explorer Police Interceptors from their fleet over carbon monoxide concerns. Austin police had Ford repair the vehicles and began returning them to service in late 2017. But as recently as last September, an officer from the Fall River Police Department in Massachusetts was diagnosed with carbon monoxide poisoning after driving his police-issue Explorer, a department spokesman said. The department hadn’t sought repairs for that vehicle under Ford’s recommended service for police cruisers to address the carbon monoxide risk, he said.
Ford says the police problems differ from civilian complaints and stem from after-market modifications to the vehicles—like holes drilled in their bodies to allow for special wiring.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers argue otherwise. “It is an Explorer defect issue, period,” said Brian Chase, whose client, Brian McDowell, a former police officer, is suing Ford. McDowell passed out behind the wheel of an Explorer Police Interceptor at almost 50 miles per hour in 2015. He veered across several lanes of traffic before crashing into a tree. Ford has denied responsibility for McDowell’s accident or his injuries, according to court papers filed in the suit.
purred in part by media reports, some Explorer drivers around the country, like Henriksen, have used portable carbon-monoxide detectors to measure air quality in their vehicles. Some have reported alarming results.
An Eastlake, Ohio, driver found a concentration of 141 parts per million, according to an Oct. 19 complaint to NHTSA. Another in Kane, Pennsylvania, in 2014 reported a range of 75 to 100 ppm. One in Las Cruces, New Mexico, cited levels as high as 43 ppm in a 2013 Explorer, and one in Hughes Springs, Texas, reported 38 ppm. Carbon monoxide concentrations in the air typically register less than 2 ppm, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Levine, the Ford spokesman, said carbon monoxide should only be measured with scientifically calibrated detectors—which can cost several hundred dollars—and added that chemicals inside vehicles, such as vapors from cleaners, solvents and air fresheners, could cause false readings.
The deadly effects of exposure to high carbon monoxide levels are well known, but experts say chronic exposure to lower levels can also be unhealthy. While there’s no U.S. standard for interior air quality in motor vehicles, various agencies have set workplace limits, ranging from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s 50 ppm to California state regulators’ 25 ppm. Both limits are average exposures over an eight-hour shift.
Even lower levels can still cause harm, especially to vulnerable people, such as the elderly, babies and people with heart disease, said Dr. Lindell Weaver, a physician and carbon monoxide expert in Salt Lake City. Workplace standards were written to protect otherwise healthy adults, not those vulnerable groups, he said, and they presume workers are at sea level, not higher elevations where carbon monoxide’s effects can be magnified.
“The situation and the individual factor into much of this, and that’s why having a hard and fast rule is difficult if not impossible,” he said.
In its August 2016 letter to NHTSA, Ford said the carbon monoxide it had found was well below established limits, but it cited an air-quality standard that experts say they can’t verify. Ford’s letter said the “Global Vehicle Interior Air Quality Standard” allows for continuous exposure to 25 ppm for an hour. But Google searches for that phrase showed no official use of it anywhere—except by Ford in its letter to NHTSA. A spokesman for Underwriters Laboratories, a U.S.-based product-safety certification company, said its subject experts were also unaware of any standard by that name.
Asked for more information about the standard, Ford didn’t provide any. Instead, its spokesman, Levine, said: “There is no single government standard specifically for vehicle interiors. Like all other automakers, Ford references a variety of government standards, guidelines and sources to ensure the safety of our vehicles.”
