Aftermarket Parts: A Way of Life
If you're reading this magazine, you're interested in high-performance Blue Oval action. This almost certainly means you've gotten involved in personalizing your car with performance-enhancing parts and accessories. If you're an intelligent reader, you probably don't expect Ford to support your racing habits. For example, you wouldn't anticipate Ford performing warranty work on, say, your slipping stock clutch sitting behind your 650hp supercharged mod motor. But what you should expect is for Ford to repair those things it is legally obligated to, provided something you did to the car didn't cause the problem. The aforementioned air conditioning system fix would be an excellent example of a repair Ford could almost never legally wriggle out of, as it is almost inconceivable that such a performance-enhancing part could in any way lead to A/C system failure. As another example, it would be almost impossible to argue that an after-cat exhaust system created any problem with any part of a car whatsoever.
Things aren't always so black and white when it comes to warranty work, though. Like it or not, there's often good reason for Ford and its dealerships to be concerned about the installation of aftermarket parts on Mustangs. Aside from worries about what they might deem the inferior quality of these non-Ford components, they can add stress to existing parts of the vehicle. Longtime MM&FF contributor Bernie Golick, who became a Ford employee in 1964 and was a former district service engineer in the New York district office, explains. "The lifetime of a vehicle goes down naturally as horsepower goes up. Though there's no mechanical reason a car can't come off the assembly line with many more horses under the hood-even while still meeting all applicable emissions laws-manufacturers cut their vehicles' power to extend engine life, let the transmission live longer, and so on. People can uncork this power that the manufacturer has left on the table with exhaust modifications, underdrive pulleys, and other types of personalization. But there's always another effect. Underdrive pulleys change your alternator and water pump speed; they can cause damage if there's already a defect in the cooling system, for example."
Theoretically, on the hottest day in Tampa history, and while sitting in stopped traffic for hours, a set of underdrive pulleys might contribute to inadequate cooling and aggravate the fact that the factory had poured an incorrect mixture of antifreeze into the vehicle, thereby causing overheating and a seized engine. This and many other mods fall into a gray area of causation, where it's often unclear whether the vehicle owner's personalizations have contributed meaningfully to the damage in question.
But without even making such an intellectual leap, some dealerships will look at a car with aftermarket modifications and simply assume the personalization could cause damage to totally unrelated parts of the vehicle. Theoretically, headers could end up melting a ring land if the owner didn't bother reflashing the computer and thereby allowed the motor to run too lean; and dealers have turned customers down saying they won't touch any part of a car that has headers on it. A blower pulley swap on a late-model Cobra could conceivably cause a problem with the supercharger or engine, due to increased stresses on the internals of each, but would it cause a leaking differential?
The link between cause and effect is what it all comes down to, and the trick is to prove there's no substantial connection between an aftermarket part and the problem in question. A tie-in can be made to the legal concept of "proximate causation." I'll spare you the exact details of this concept (go pick up a copy of Prosser's Torts if you must know more); just know that while an effect can have multiple causes-in-fact, there's generally only one true "proximate" or "legal" cause in a multiple-cause scenario-the others simply add to the inevitable.
This also leads to other gray areas: What if the dealership has an in-house "personalization" center and sells modified cars as new? Or, if like one person we know, paid extra for an extended warranty on a slightly used '03 SVT Cobra and then discovered the car was already modified with a blower pulley, computer tune, and after-cat exhaust. Could the warranty she paid extra for be voided by another Ford dealership if she needed to take it in for unexpected repairs?
But the blame isn't entirely with the dealerships. Ford proper also has a big hand in denying claims, as it keeps a close eye on dealerships' warranty repairs. More warranty work being done at a given dealership equals more money out of Ford's pocket, so when this starts to happen, Ford begins keeping a closer eye on that dealership. It'll demand more and more information for each claim that comes in, and oftentimes require that the dealership service personnel call and get approval from Ford before performing a warranty repair. In such cases, the blame for denying what should be a valid warranty claim would lie with Ford Motor Company and not the servicing dealership.