2003 Ford Crown Victoria

The 2003 Ford Crown Victoria has 6 recalls, the most serious being steel wheel cracking on Police Interceptor and taxi models that can cause a tire to rapidly lose air and make the vehicle difficult or impossible to control.

The wheel cracking issue affects police and taxi variants specifically, where the combination of high-demand tires, suspension tuning, and severe loading during pursuit or heavy-duty use puts stress on the rim near the weld where the rim meets the disk. A cracked wheel often signals itself through a slow air leak, a vibration felt through the steering wheel, or a wheel and tire assembly that cannot be properly balanced. Left unaddressed, the crack can progress to sudden, rapid air loss.

There is also a fire risk on Police Interceptors and Commercial Heavy Duty taxi vehicles: the insulating pad on the outer dash can sag far enough to contact the surface of the catalytic converter nearby. When that contact occurs, the insulator can char, produce a burning smell, or begin to smoke, which may develop into a fire.

On the electrical side, the lighting control module can fail and cause both the high and low headlight beams to go out without warning. When this happens, the headlights do not simply shut off entirely but instead drop back to a reduced-voltage daytime running light mode, which provides significantly less illumination than full headlights and reduces how well the driver can see the road ahead at night. Prior repair attempts did not fully resolve this issue, which is why it appears across more than one recall filing.