NHTSA Complaint #11420666 — 2015 FORD EXPLORER

In July 2020, after car had sat mostly unused from March 2020 to June 2020 due to the pandemic lockdown, steering binded up while turning left out of a parking lot at a slow speed. Had to yank the steering wheel to get it to return to normal steering. Made a popping sound when yanked. Didn’t happen again but in September 2020 started noticing a lot of popping when the wheel would turn left or right at slow speeds. Took car to Meineke. They diagnosed need for new front struts. These were replaced at a cost of $1000. Popping stopped until about November 2020. Noticed it again only intermittently when pulling out of driveway and turning steering wheel far left or right. Would hear a single pop sound. From then until June 2021 would notice this intermittently and had steering bind up again probably 2 more times. Very terrifying to have to yank hard to get steering wheel to turn correctly when driving in traffic. Steering did seem a little loose as well. After reading about the hundreds of complaints about rack and pinions going bad on 2014-2016 explorers and seeing that my car’s symptoms were exactly the same I knew this had to be the issue. I took the car to Meineke and they wanted $3600 to replace the rack and pinion which was way too much. Ford dealer at Oxmoor replaced for $1988. The car had 103,000 miles when the problems started. It had a certified preowned warranty through 100,000 miles so of course this wasn’t covered but a rack and pinion should not fail in a 6 year old car with barely over 100K miles. And having steering that doesn’t work is extremely dangerous. Ford needs to step up and take responsibility for this failure and do a recall in ALL explorers that are having this issue and replace the rack and pinions and reimburse those that have had to pay out of pocket for it. My father worked for Ford and I’ve been loyal to this brand but after spending over $3000 on a car in a matter of 6 months that is barely 6 yrs old, I’m done with Ford.