Ford Motor Co. filed a report with federal safety regulators this month confirming that 53,103 four-door Bronco vehicles may have a faulty child lock.
The letter dated June 13 and sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with another letter sent to Ford dealers said the child safety lock in the back seat on the passenger side only may indicate it is locked when it is not and allow children to open the vehicle door while inside.
Dealers who have orders pending but haven't delivered the vehicle yet have a stop order on delivery until the defect is fixed.
Affected vehicles were built between Sept. 23, 2020, and April 11, 2022. Ford said the first nonfunctional child safety lock was spotted during a quality audit inspection on March 2, 2022, at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne.
"All vehicles at the plant were quarantined and inspected for this condition, with 1.5% exhibiting the condition on rear right-hand latches and no reports on rear left-hand latches," Ford said in its regulatory filing.
"Enhanced inspection protocols were also implemented at the rear door latch module supplier because the rear door latch module includes the child safety lock mechanism. The supplier inspection found that the child safety locks were functional prior to installation in the sheet metal doors."
Holes in the sheet metal were not within design specifications because changes were made to create a bit of flexibility in final production, known as "manufacturing tolerance expansion," Ford said in its letter.
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"Door latch attachment hole locations on the rear door sheet metal assemblies were returned to design specification positions at Ford’s stamping plant, without the manufacturing tolerance expansion, which corrected the concern," Ford said in its government filing. "Review of sheet metal stamping plant records did not identify any changes or factors believed to contribute to out-of-specification sheet metal attachment hole location dating from Job #1 through the date of the vehicle stop-ship. Ford is not aware of any warranty or field reports related to this concern."
Ford said it is not aware of any reports of death or injury involving faulty child safety locks. The company plans to send out recall letterson July 25 advising owners to have their vehicle's child safety locks inspected and replaced if necessary.
Contact Phoebe Wall Howard at 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com . Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid . Read more on Ford and sign up for our autos newsletter .