Built Ford Tough

 

At Ford, Quality is Job One. Job Two is referring you to a good local towing service. I don’t know what Job Three is, but I know that it’s not running diagnostics to see why your truck bricked with less than 70,000 miles on it, because mine has been on their lot for three days now and I haven’t heard a word.

It’s not that it didn’t warn me. The truck had shown me a little yellow cartoon wrench and asked me to service it soon. I called Ford, and they said they would need it all day and didn’t have a loaner or rental, so I made an appointment for Friday. Friday wasn’t soon enough.

When the truck decided not to start outside of K&G Fashion, it did so decisively. It didn’t crank or sputter. I didn’t do anything except show me a new cartoon light, this one in red, that said “Stop Safely.”

I called Ford, and they advised me to call Bill’s Towing a little too quickly. The driver that showed up wasn’t Bill, but he’d been driving a tow truck for 30 years. It took him a couple of hours to get there, but when I mentioned this he explained his previous call was picking up a car in which the police had just shot and killed the man behind the wheel, so I let it go.

He asked me to put the truck in neutral, and I said, “Yeah, about that…” My truck has a 10-speed electronic transmission, so when the computer gives up the ghost nothing is happening. The tow truck driver, the boys and I all started Googling to determine our next steps. The tow truck driver was a faster Googler (probably had better favorites saved) and determined that if you pry off a little secret panel directly under the steering wheel, there is a tiny secret chrome lever with an orange ribbon on it, and if


you pull it out and push it up it will lock the transmission into neutral.

That almost got us there. But even though the truck’s computer didn’t remember how to start or shift out of park, it still knew if it was rolling backward it wanted to apply the parking brake. It did this, I disengaged the parking brake, it re-engaged the parking brake. It continued to do this unless I held the parking brake handle in the up position. I did this and cranked the wheel while the boys and the tow truck driver pushed the truck by hand into a place where the driver could winch it up onto the back of his rollback truck.

The tow truck only had two seats, so the boys walked Mary to Ford, using a bungee cord for a leash because we didn’t have one with us. At the onset of this saga I knew it was unlikely that I would be driving the truck home that day, so I called the local Enterprise to rent a car. They booked me one to pick up that afternoon.

Ford called me an Uber and sent me to Enterprise. After a long wait behind a couple of other customers, the guy behind the counter said, “Oh, I see you just made this reservation recently. Unfortunately, due to holiday travel, we don’t have any cars.” Seinfeld did a bit about rental cars not holding reservations in 1991. “Anyone can take a reservation. The important thing is holding the reservation.” Nothing has changed. The counter man reported none of the other Enterprise locations in Tacoma had cars either. The boys and I took off walking across South Tacoma, my new suit over by shoulder and our bungee-corded dog at our side.

Why walking instead of just calling? Because when you call a rental car company, the number you get from the website looks like a local number, but it’s actually routed to a national call center. You will get someone on the line who will take your reservation. But that person has no idea if the place you are going to actually has a car. They will take your reservation – they won’t hold your reservation.

We arrived at a Hertz within an hour of closing. After waiting quite a while behind a few other customers, we found they had a car. We took it. They could have fleeced me, but they didn’t. I’m paying a fair rate.

The boys reminded me to look on the bright side. In the previous few days the truck had been both on the beach, and up in the mountains in a snow storm, hours from Tacoma. Breaking down in either of those locations would have been an expensive disaster. The truck broke down less than mile from a Ford dealership, so the towing charge was minimal, and when Enterprise stood us up, we only had to walk about a mile to Hertz to find another car. These things happened on a day when we didn’t have anything going on anyway. There was really never a more convenient way to break down.

I think I know why the boys are optimists. Henry’s car that he had for years was a 35-year-old El Camino. Oliver’s was a 30-year-old Corvette. Both cost well under $5,000. Neither ever had to be towed.

I called the Ford the next day to check on the truck. I left a message with someone. No one called me back. I called Ford again the following day to check on the truck. I left a message with someone. No one called me back.

Have you driven a Ford lately? No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2GmGSNvaM

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