In addition to working with and transporting our child and teen clients, we also had to move their bed and personal belongings if they were being transferred from one foster home to another. We had no wagons, and this was before minivans were commonplace, so we had to use our 4 door and 2 door sedans to move all of that stuff.
Just visualize an official-looking black sedan with the Great Seal of The State of NJ on its door–with a mattress tied to the roof and the interior bulging with bags & boxes. It used to feel like something out of The Beverly Hillbillies.
We had a Taurus and I liked it a lot. I bought it for my wife and two children. We soon had 3 little ones, and it was a war zone in the back seat. When I referred to them as Moe, Larry, and Curly they stopped for a while. Reliability was decent. We liked it enough that our next car was a Windstar van. They were fairly well separated then. Reliability wasn’t nearly as good with that Ford.
@jtsanders I had a 1988 Taurus which I liked. It had the 3.8 V6. It accelerated well and was reliable. One of my friends and colleagues had a 1987 Taurus with the 4 cylinder engine and he had problems with the car from day one and it was brand new when he bought it. The Taurus I owned got better mileage than my friend’s 4 cylinder. The 4 cylinder Taurus had a 3 speed automatic while the V6 Taurus had a 4 speed automatic where the 4th speed was overdrive. That may have accounted for the difference in gasoline mileage.
My parents had a similar era Taurus which they liked. It was their " retirement car", so it was configured w/ all the bells and whistles. The only problem with it was the ignition switch, which for some reason had to be replaced several times.
The ignition switch failures on the Taurus (and other Fords) was caused by the blower motor current being routed through the switch instead of through a relay. With age and the current increasing the switch was prone to failure due to overheating.
Same principle when it comes to Honda ignition switches only this time it’s the fuel pump and engine controls. Or VW and their 50 amp glow plug fuse/80 amp surge.
That is why electrical engineers get paid the big bucks; to overlook the obvious.
Interesting, thanks for the update. On a similar note, for some reason the current which powers the starter motor solenoid is routed through my Corolla’s ignition switch, which caused me some grief. Solenoid current is short in duration, but about 15 amps. I saw no reason to route it through the delicate ignition switch other than to save $10 on the relay, so I installed a bypass relay. No problems since.
I think that you are generalizing too much. My Fords have served me well. The one I had the switch problem with was still running well at 410k miles and carried a 160 PSI of compression at 375k miles on the 3.0 Vulcan engine. I had 2 reasons for getting rid of it.
Sheer boredom.
Storm threw a tree branch through the windshield so that was a good enough excuse to solve No. 1.
Toyotas, just like every other car, have their share of issues and break just like everything else. Many times those problems are self-inflicted. Sometimes not. Just one year and model cut and pasted below.
I spent nearly 20 years in the field as a Mechanical Breakdown Inspector investigating mechanical failures of EVERY SINGLE MAKE/MODEL sold in the US. I was doing roughly 1,000 inspections per year, and - according to my database - I saw 1-2 Toyotas and Hondas (NOT today’s Hondas!) a year, and most of them were due to lack of maintenance, neglect, or abuse.
The rest 998-999 were all kinds of fords, jeeps, pontiacs, cadillacs, bmws, rovers, jaguars, and suchlike.
Occasionally - OCCASIONALLY - somebody may have good luck with a ford but statistically - HELL NO!
Hint: Do you know who owns the fordsucks.com domain? Wrong answer - it’s FORD MOTOR COMPANY. No kidding. See for yourself.
Well, I’ve spent most of my very lengthy life as a mechanic on the so-called foreign brands and have seen countless flaws due to engineering no matter what the badge says on the back of the vehicle. I’d like to have a dollar for every “But…but…it’s a (fill in the blank). Why am I having this problem…” I’ve had to listen to.
As for my Fords, that 410k miles one is not alone. My prior Lincoln only had a quarter million miles on it when someone ran a red light and made a total of it. Being a Mopar fan, at least it was a Dodge…
Current Lincoln has almost 300k miles on it. Many of the farmers around here use Fords which get thrashed on a daily basis in the dirt/mud and in general being driven into the ground. If those vehicles were very problematic they would not buy them and Ford would not produce them.
Our local mail route carrier used a Ford Ranger for a long time. He traded in for a Tacoma and that Tacoma spent almost a year in the shop for the 3 years he owned. Traded it off for a Jeep.
So; I provided a link to one year model Toyota Camry with a long laundry list of TSBs. You did not address the answer as to why those TSBs exist.
I never bothered to count number of techs in the stealerships I did inspections at but it’s quite possible that divided between fords, jeeps, pontiacs, cadillacs, bmws, rovers, jaguars, and suchlike, it was the case.