rockville

Is there evidence they need to?

You really seem big on bashing Ford. Really I can only think of two big Ford safety recalls. This one and the Firestone tire one.

The Firestone tire recalls weren't NHTSA ordered, the were initiated by Ford. Although no one has satisfactorily explained why the Firestone tires failed more than other tires (in engineering terms, not tort lawyer terms) Ford issued a recall anyway.
This is another one where the root cause of the problem has been difficult to identify.

Has Honda issued a recall on the fire prone CRV's? What is the claims rate on CRVs vs on the millions of Ford trucks on the road.

Unfortunately with many of these cases, the actual occurrence rates get lost in the numbers. People see a big number and assume things are bad when in fact the actual rate isn't bad compared to other vehicles. Last year Mazda sold ~9000 Miatas. For sold ~900,000 F series trucks. So a 0.1% failure in the Miata equals 9 cars. In the F series trucks it equals 900. 900 makes the news. Nine? Well we just pay them off and they go away. Forgive me if I think many of these recall stories read like which hunts. Somewhere I saw a great post that was comparing two similar recalls, one of a Honda, one of a GM or Ford. They went though, paragraph buy paragraph and illustrated how the media covered what was essentially the same story differently. The Ford (or was it GM?) recall had a very clear negative slant and said things like it would be inconvenient to the owners to bring them in for service and the recall was ordered by the NHTSA. The Honda article said that dealers would provide the service free of charge and it was a voluntary recall. Well both companies were providing the service free of charge, in both cases the recall voluntary and free of charge. In both cases the owners would be inconvenienced. Why the negative tone for Ford and the light tone for Honda.

Really the reason why I (and others) make posts like this is we see the unfair wrap the domestics often get. I agree that they have things they need to work on. I would post things like I want better interiors but hey others will do that for me. I

C U AT 9K

in top gear, clarkson says the ford lightning engine was used in the gt. its likely, but tuned much more aggresively im sure. kinda like the viper?

rockville

Again, the GT and Lightning engines are from the same family (Ford modular V8 family, includes the 4.6L SOHC through the GT's motor). They are NOT the same motor and they share almost no parts. Among other small differences they have two different types of superchargers and the GT block is alloy, the Lightning is iron. I suspect they have lots of parts that could be interchanged but they are not the same motor.