If you are with a Ford India BS6 1.5L TDCi diesel engine vehicle like Aspire, Figo, FreeStyle or mainly EcoSports, you may have faced issues with your diesel particulate filter (DPF) under city driving condition, leading to multiple service centre visit for rectification of the same.
If you don’t own a BS6 1.5 TDCi diesel Ford then you may not be aware for this issue bothering many vehicle owners. DPF is an added component to all diesel engines in India to reduce pollution and emission to meet the BS6 standard. DPF is a filtering mechanism to first capture harmful particles from exhaust gas and later when your car is out in open highway or driving with higher RPM, heat of the exhaust helps to burn off those particles or soot as that’s the common name for it.
However in city driving condition, exhaust system temps may not reach such level with lower RPM slow driving to burn off the soot and in time to time, ECU will warn the driver to manually rev the engine to a higher RPM in parked mode for a certain period of time (like 10, 15 mins) to complete this burn off process.
But in case of Ford 1.5 TDCi BS6 diesels, specially with EcoSports, for many owners around the country, the system isn’t working as it is supposed to. For many users, simple 150-200 kms of driving will trigger the manual cleaning mode and even after the manual cleaning operation, the warning won’t go away and user is forced to take the vehicle to a service centre to solve the issue.
Once the filter is overloaded and vehicle onboard systems fails to clean it, the power & performance is reduced and driving becomes very jerky and problematic with lethargic acceleration. Further, driving with such condition will damage the vehicle emission control systems and eventually it may cause fire hazard.
Soft Recall by Ford India for DPF issues of BS6 1.5 TDCi Diesels
Initially as with any manufacturer, companies go on denial mode and attend the issues at individual customer level via their authorised service centres. But when things go out of hand and clearly there is a widespread issue, companies will come up with a solution and proactively carry out the needed work to fix the issue in all effected vehicles.
Often in India due to lack of recall law, they don’t announce the recall publicly to avoid negative PR and follow the soft recall route where individual dealerships are asked to contact the effected customers come in a rectify the issue at free of charge.
Here too, in this case it seems Ford India has taken the soft recall route to contact the effected customers individually and get their car fixed at free of cost.
If you own a BS6 Ford 1.5 TDCi diesel Aspire, Figo, Freestyle or mainly EcoSports, visit the ford service recall website to enter your car’s VIN number to check if your vehicle needs this work. Alternatively you may call you nearest Ford India Authorised workshop and enquire about it.
As of writing this article, Ford India is yet to issue any press release or any official information about this recall action. Therefor, it is not known what kind of work is performed in the effected engines or vehicle for the solution.
Some owners are reporting in various online community that, it may take upto 3 days for completing the work as it involves changing / replacing some of the critical engine components like Engine Head, Catalyst Converter and related exhaust system parts and some sensors along with ECU/PCM software update.
