Three months into 2026, Ford is continuing an unenviable trend from last year: issuing more recalls than any other automaker. As of this writing, the Blue Oval has issued 14 recalls, nearly three times as many as second-placed Toyota and Hyundai, with five each. Its latest concerns 2020-2022 model years, says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, impacting the Ford Explorer and Escape and their Lincoln siblings, the Aviator and Corsair. Some 604,533 vehicles are afflicted with potentially faulty windshield wiper motors, a problem customers flagged back in 2021, and given the extreme weather conditions forecast in parts of the country, the risk of a crash is heightened.
Why Ford Is Recalling Hundreds of Thousands of SUVs
Ford
The NHTSA recall report indicates that the wiper motor itself is not necessarily faulty, but "the motor's cover terminal may have been misaligned with the brush card terminal." The report doesn't go into much detail to explain how this may have occurred, but OEM supplier Valeo is named, indicating that the problem occurred during the components' manufacturing process, not during assembly at a Ford plant. Regardless, the problem causes a bad connection that results in a loss of electrical continuity within the motor over time. In other words, affected vehicles' wipers may work fine one day, be faulty the next, and work again the following day.
Related: Ford Wants to Fix Your Car the Same Day
Either way, dealers have already been notified of the problem and will replace the wiper motor at no charge to the customer, but customers are in for a long wait. While VINs are already searchable on nhtsa.gov and interim owner notifications will go out next week, remedy notifications are only expected from May 11-15.
Ford Customers Have Been Waiting for a Fix for a Long Time
Lincoln
Frustratingly for anyone affected by this windshield wiper issue, the problem reared its head years ago, with an investigation into warranty claims and customer complaints already opened back in June 2021. By September 28, 2021, Ford had closed the initial investigation, concluding that "the condition did not pose an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety." The investigation projected that the issue would not appear in many vehicles, but in November 2025, Ford's Critical Concern Review Group was forced to reopen the investigation when it noticed an increased rate of occurrence.
Since then and last month, Ford and Valeo looked at historical teardown records and warranty claims, and by February 18, the automaker identified 1,374 warranty claims related to the issue, whether total failure or intermittent failure. Despite the long wait, no accidents or injuries related to this problem have come to Ford's attention, but by the time a fix comes, some customers may have been waiting nearly five years.
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