I know you probably don't remember me because it has been over three months since I wrote after finding your web page. As a reminder, I was the one with the Villager Van that would not start after driving for awhile and shutting the engine off and would sometimes stall or hesitate when stepping on the gas.

I did contact the State's Attorney's office to see if the car was ever turned in under the lemon law and it didn't show up on their computer. I wrote to Ford Motor Customer Service as instructed in their automobile manual and explained all the troubles I had had, especially the problem that the dealership was having no luck in fixing and asked them if they had any suggestion. I received little better than a form letter thanking me for my correspondence and telling them of my problems so that they could work towards making Ford a better product. No help. No suggestions.

I did get ahold of a lemon law manual and there is a time concern, and my car is a 1993 model with over 44,000 miles on it. However, the first time I complained about this problem occurred before the time was up and I had it in writing on a repair slip that they checked a few things out looking for the problem.

We called the dearlership and talked with the manager, not the repair manager, and basically told him that he needed to find the problem and fix it or buy the car back. He got us a rental that we could have until the problem was fixed and they went looking in earnest.

They now have regional brainstorming sessions about problems like this that are temperamental and hard to find. My car was a major topic. It took them five hours, but what they found was a temperature sensor that was registering that it was minus four degrees.[Ed. Note: a -4 degree temp sensor reading should have shown up on any computer diagnostic system - it makes me wonder just how much they really did work in this problem]. Funny thing is that a friend I had been talking to the previous Saturday said it sounded like a problem he had that turned out to be a bad temperature sensor and I forgot to mention that to the mechanic. Maybe now they will know enough to look there first.

Thanks for having such a good resource and giving your help to so many people. Maybe this will be one for your pages. Sue Smith spsmith@dkeep.com

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