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New 8/3/06
If you are not familiar with the movie “The Gods Must be Crazy”; in the movie someone throws a single Coke a Cola bottle out the window of a small airplane flying over remote reaches of Africa. The bottle is found by a Bushman who finds it endlessly useful, but because there is only one bottle discord overtakes the tribe members who covet and will not share the bottle. The quest of the movie is to return the empty bottle to the gods who created this wonderful object; but alas made only one.
The Bushman is not alone in this feeling, most V8SHO owners have found the car to be almost the perfect performance sedan, a very rare and choice executive express. It has a balance; a poise at speed; a Zen like composure that many never thought an American automobile manufacturer was capable of producing. I can not think of another car I would rather take on a long trip or spend many hours a day driving. The owners are universally zealots, fanatical, extremely loyal to this car and the driving experience it provides. At conventions the Gen III SHO out pace the lighter and more powerful Gen I-II SHOs because of the much more ridged chassis. We love this car, in a way few will ever find love but wish they could.
Then we make the same bad assumption every scientist makes in every B grade Sci-Fi flick. A civilization capable of making interplanetary trips must also be benign and enlightened. Or in our case an automotive manufacture capable of making so sophisticated and meeting all our dreams in an automobile must be functioning at some minimal moral and ethical level?
So in our naiveté we made endless phone calls, hell we called the Ford help line until we over loaded the phone circuits and Ford has yet to produce records of all those calls. We sent numerous failed cam shafts back to Dearborn, surely a company capable of making such a wonderful car would want to know if a problem existed and want to do the right thing?
That is not what happened, when hundreds if not thousands of V8SHO owners ended up at Ford dealership they were made to feel like dumb Bushman. We were told that did not know how to treat our cars, we were accused of abusing and neglecting them? When the gods speak Bushman listen. We loved our SHOs far more than the gods did but most owners, already heartbroken took the divine abuse since “who argues with gods?”
The fly in the ointment is the “rare and mostly take care of under warranty”, hell as the bodies stacked up and we began to understand the mechanics of cam failure we came to understand that the flaw is not rare, it is a manufacturing defect affecting every V8SHO to different degrees; and what is rare is for the problem to be take care of under warranty.
Look at a bee hive and one sees planning, orderly execution, beauty and intelligence. But the intelligence is not in the bee but in the creator of the bees. Find the wrong bees on the wrong day and they will, honey aside, sting you to death and eat your flesh. Like the bee, maybe we should rejoice that Ford has developed or imported some high degree of mechanical competence. Like the bees that neither makes them benign or morally, ethically or legally competent.
Alas, we are still searching for any sign of advanced life in Dearborn.
Timothy Wright,
AKA Buford T Justice