To Ford Motor Company
To Whom It May Concern,
My wife owns a 1996 Ford Contour built by your company. It has been a good car for her. It is reliable and has never given her any trouble.
Last week she was informed by Washington State that not only were her license registration tabs were due for renewal but that the license plates for her car were being retired and that she would need to be assigned new ones when she came in and paid for her new tabs.
Everything went well enough with getting the new plates and the tabs, especially with the state’s estimate at her renewal fees being incorrect and her not having to pay a particular tax, saving us to the tune of $40. It was when she got home and it was time to change out the plates that the trouble began, and this is the part where your company is at fault.
It seems that in the designing of the vehicle, your company decided to go with and injection molded plastic panel that fits into the vertical portion of the trunk lid and holds the license plates. Your designers also decided to have, instead of reliable steel screw retainers, four plastic female inserts that are pressed into the plastic panel.
These inserts fail 50% of the time, causing me no amount of headache.
After removing the top two screws holding the plate onto the vehicle, I attempted to remove the bottom two, only to have the inserts strip out and not let the plate screws retract from them.
After giving up on the screwdriver, I switched to a socket and driver to try and back the screws out. When that didn’t work, I switched to a pair of vise grips to try to turn and pull the screws out, but to no avail. Due to the body panel that holds the plates being plastic, I didn’t want to risk cracking or otherwise breaking it by applying levered pressure from my Zytel prybar in an attempt to coerce the screws out.
I ended up having to retrieve my dremel and connect up the cutting bit and cut the heads off of the screws just so that I could remove the old, and now illegal, plate off of the car.
She now has her new plates on her car, along with two headless quarter inch bolts sticking out of her trunk lid as I do not want to risk breaking the plastic panel in any further attempts at removing them.
I would just like to say thanks for the hassle. If you ever feel the wont to do so, please send me the name of both the designer of that particular feature and the executive who OK’d its installation onto the vehicle.
I have two swift kicks in the nuts awaiting delivery and I would hate to have to give them randomly.
Thank you for your time