2018 Ford Transit Electrical System

In hot or humid conditions, the 8 inch center display flashes on and off intermittently. This failure makes the backup camera unusable, which is a safety problem. It also makes controlling the navigation or radio very difficult. The dealer has looked at this vehicle problem a few times in the last five years and has been unable to duplicate the problem. I cannot force this to occur at the dealership service department. Because the weather condition needed to duplicate this problem rarely occur near my home getting service for this is very difficult. Once the heat or humidity has subsided via using the air conditioning, the problem goes away after an hour or so.

Odometer Fraud. The contact purchased a 2018 Ford Transit. The contact stated that upon taking the vehicle to the Ford dealer for service, the contact was informed that the vehicle was a Lemon vehicle, and that there was a mileage discrepancy. The vehicle was a dealer sale. At the time of purchase, the vehicle mileage was 33,135; however, upon retrieving the Carfax history report of the vehicle, the Ford dealer informed the contact that the vehicle mileage was 240,000.

On March 7, 2023, at approximately 1:45 PM, Bus 437 had caught fire in the engine compartment of the vehicle while sitting in the parking lot. The bus had just came off of a route minutes before & the driver had reported the dash tell tale (warning) lights had come on. The Operator switched the engine off and then noticed smoke coming from the engine compartment area prior to the thermal event. The fire caused significant damage & the vehicle is a total loss; the engine compartment, bus body, interior as well as exterior and top cap of the bus were affected. An independent firm was hire to conduct the fire investigation ( EFI Global, Inc.) & determined the source of the fire to be a power supply from the vehicles jump box; however our history with alternator failures & consumption of these components combined with my mechanical experience leads me to believe that the root cause of this has been overlooked and the alternator failures need to be further investigated for public safety reasons. I have engage the dealer principal (Creative Bus Sales, Inc.) who we purchased the vehicle from whom is working with Ford on this matter. The Alternator is the component that I want investigated & the one in question has not been removed from the vehicle however we did break down 3 alternators from our inventory of failed cores & the findings support my theory as the alternator (diodes) being the culprit of the failures. The cause of the fire is believed to be a situation created when the single alternator overheated causing the diode bridge to fail & alternator to ignite. We have experienced alternator failures on this group of buses since the vehicles inception into the fleet going back to 2018. 38 of these model buses were purchased & placed into service in 2018 & we have replaced 283 alternators since they were placed into service (very high consumption/failure rates).