Faults:

Blown head gaskets and cracked heads 109,000.

General Comments:

Oh boy, now I find this page.

I just bought a 1995 ford windstar 3 weeks ago and just my luck... Blown head gaskets and cracked heads.

Boy I really think ford needs to recall and destroy this engine, since this problem happened only 3 weeks after buying the car from a dealer they are being nice enough to pay for all repairs, but I just know that from all the problems I have read about with this year windstar I have a long and expensive road ahead of me...

I could kick myself for not Researching this ahead of time...

WARNING >>>>> DO NOT BUY A FORD>>>> I just got off the phone with ford and they will of course do nothing... What did I expect... Never again.

Faults:

Where do I begin?

At first the interior lights would stay on a drain the battery - dealer fixed this, but now the door ajar light and beep noise constantly go off.

The biggest problem is that this van has a mind of its own when it shifts. It downshifts hard, and doesn't like going through the gears the way its supposed to.

The transmission was checked and cleared. The speed sensor was the replaced and the weird shifting stopped. 2 weeks later and it started again. No fix yet. REALLY bad on gas when engine is revving at 3500 RPM all the time.

Then the alternator and belts and bearings and everything attached to the serpentine belt went.

Then the dashboard froze up. No instruments working now.

And Ford sends me information on their new FREESTAR? from what I hear, it's the same van - just different looks.

General Comments:

The van is comfortable and spacious. Reliable it isn't. I wish I had seen the previous reviews here first.

Faults:

Within a month of the 30,000 mile warranty expiring, the transmission had to be replaced.

The head gaskets went.

The power windows would randomly stop working for months at a time before working again.

On a cross-country trip between the Midwest and the West Coast, the cruise control stopped working. Then the overdrive light began flashing before randomly and without warning switching gears (i.e. we'd be going 70 on the highway and suddenly find ourselves going 40). A call to our mechanic suggested disconnecting and reconnecting the computer (as this was a computer glitch caused by the higher altitude of the Rockies). We did this all through Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California, averaging 40 mph and stopping every hour to reset the computer (which took ten to fifteen minutes itself). Nevada is pretty in the summer, but for a couple of hours, not for three days each way.

Problem seemed to be fixed, but started happening again recently; transmission is done for for the second time, and we must junk the car because it's not worth it to get it fixed.

Air conditioning stopped working (didn't work well to begin with).

Noisy engine made it hard to communicate between front seats and rear seats (though perhaps parents would find this a plus).

Numerous other little things (stiff steering, strange noises, weird vibrations at stops) have gone wrong and required fixing -- human memory is finite, though, unlike the Windstar's problems.

General Comments:

Ford has been very delinquent in acknowledging and fixing known problems with the car.

When we took the car in to the dealership for head gasket problems at 99,000 miles, they didn't tell us about the recall, and said it was okay. We drove it some more, but the problems didn't improve, so we took it in again. We were now over 100,000 miles, so under the recall we were no longer covered by the warranty. They refused to fix it until we threatened legal action and began looking for a lawyer.

I'm trying to think of something good about the car... the fuel economy was bad, the seats were about average or below for comfort, the back seat had no leg room, the tint on the windows peeled off, the sliding door was extremely hard to get closed... but the color was pretty!