If you bought a Ford Focus anywhere between 2012-2018, you’re going to get a notice in the mail to head to the dealership ASAP because you might stall in the middle of a drive.

Having your car shutoff on you when you’re driving is never a pleasant experience and could be a potentially fatal one if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. To get in front of a potential PR disaster and loss of lives, as per Ford in an official press release published earlier this week (Oct. 25, 2018) Ford is recalling close to 1.5 million Ford Focuses built between 2012-2018, specifically the ones that came with the bog-standard 2.0L GDI engines and 2.0L GTDI engines built prior to Feb 2018.

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The problem is with the canister purge valve which traps excessive fuel vapors and sends them to the charcoal canister instead of into the atmosphere. Like most canister purge valves, the main problem is when they stick open, which is what can happen in this case. If that happens with the Ford Focus, your gas tank can literally deform which might cause fuel levels to fluctuate or the wrong fuel levels to be displayed.

If your Ford Focus can’t get the right amount of fuel because it can’t suck the fuel out of the gas tank because now it’s deformed, a stall is imminent, which is no good.

Thankfully, most canister purge valves made today are electronically controlled which means that a couple lines of code are all that’s needed for Ford to fix this problem. Ford will probably hook up some OBD-II dongle to your OBD-II port and upload new lines of code which will detect a malfunctioning canister purge valve to

prevent a potential excessive fuel vapor system vacuum condition from occurring. Dealers will inspect and replace the canister purge valve, carbon canister, fuel tank and fuel delivery module, as necessary. There will be no charge for these services. Customers should maintain at least a half tank of fuel until the recall is completed.

As an aside, how cool it would be if Ford could update cars via Over the air programming like Tesla. Then, you wouldn’t have to drive to the dealership.

Anyways, if you get a recall notice for this, head to your nearest dealership ASAP and have a half a tank of gas, too.

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