Top 5 Problems Ford Crown Victoria Sedan 1st Generation 1993-97

Hey, friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. Today, we're going to be checking out some common issues with a Gen 1 Ford Crown Vic. And that's basically in the year range between 1992 and 1997. Before we get started, I'd like for you to go ahead and click that like button, leave me a comment because I'd love to hear it, ring the bell and subscribe because that'll keep you up-to-date on our latest content.

One of the first things I want to talk about is the ignition system. And one of the things that these vehicles have a major issue with is the darn spark plugs like to work their way out of their heads and then come popping right out of there, okay? And overall, when that happens, it's going to pull the aluminum out of the head of your engine and that's going to become a major issue. You're going to be driving down the road and maybe hear a little bit of an exhaust leak for a little while, or at least it sounds like one, but basically that's just the combustion inside the cylinder coming up through here, working its way through the threads. As it does, it keeps rattling this, turning it left, left, left, unscrewing it. By the time it gets to here, there's really not very much threads and it just pulls the threads right out of the aluminum engine, right? Obviously, that's not great. That's a very common issue with these. You can put in brand new spark plugs if you want. You can torque them like you're supposed to. And for some reason, it just happens. In which case, what you would have to do is you, of course, have to hone it out. You'd have to retap it, put it in a little helicoil that's specifically made for spark plug. And then, of course, you would put in your spark plug, torque it to manufacturer specifications again, and then keep your fingers crossed.

Another thing that I would talk about with the ignition system, which is very common is your spark plug wires, okay? Generally speaking, I mean, this is for a coil, it's for a completely different vehicle but if you happen to see a spark plug boot that looked like this, instead of what it should look like, which looks more like that, this could cause a runnability issue. Overall, you could be having heat that works its way in here and obviously, it's not working out right. You could get a little tear. This could be decomposing and cracking and you could get moisture in there. That's gonna cause a runnability issue, okay? This is obviously garbage. I would go ahead and replace those wires. Anytime that I replace spark plug wires, I also like to do the spark plugs at the same time. It's just a good idea overall. And, of course, if you do, get the wires that are specifically made for your vehicle, and, of course, the spark plugs that are specifically made for your vehicle and make sure you torque them down.

So, that leads us into some of the symptoms. And let's talk about those for a second. You might notice you have a rough idle. You're sitting in a parking lot with the vehicle running, you're not obviously driving and you can feel your steering wheel shaking a little bit. You can feel your butt shaking a little bit in the seat and you're figuring out what's going on. You go pop that hood. You take a peek underneath and you see your engine doing this, just hopping all around it. It has a misfire. So, you need to figure that out. You might also notice when you step on the gas, it just goes [vocalization] and it just doesn't want to get out of its own way. Loss of power. That's very common. Especially if for some reason, one of these spark plugs happen to blow right out of there, right? You're gonna hear a loud noise. It's going to go, boo, right? And you'll hear bah, bah, bah, bah coming out of that cylinder because there's no spark plug in there. You have to keep in mind if you hear that noise and you know that that spark plug came out, you need to stop driving. If you don't, your fuel injector is going to continue pouring gasoline into that cylinder. There's going to be no spark plug to ignite it. It's going to fill up the cylinder and, of course, it's gonna keep trying to push it out every time the piston comes up and down, it's going to come shooting out of there, right? It's going to come shooting out of where the spark plug's supposed to be. It's going to dry out the inside of that cylinder, where there should be oil to protect the cylinder from the piston going up and down. It's going to dry that out so there won't be any oil in there and you're gonna really mess up your engine. Not just that, of course, like I said, you're going to have raw fuel that could just be getting pushed in and out of that engine. And maybe that spark plug even though it's not in the engine, it could still make a spark if it bounces off of something that grounds it, that'll be very bad. Nobody wants any of that.

The second thing that I want to talk about is the mass air flow sensor. And yeah, this isn't the mass air flow sensor for the vehicle that we're talking about, but I wanted to have something in my hand so I can kind of give you an idea of what it is I'm talking about. Generally speaking, the mass air flow sensor is going to be located on the air intake system that leads up to your engine. And what this is gonna do is it's going to meter the amount of air that's getting drawn through your air filter, getting right past this. It's going to say, "Wow, I'm getting a lot of air. This is great." Gonna go sucked right into the engine. At that point, it's going to send a little message up through these wires to the brain of the vehicle. And it's going to say, okay, we've got this much air coming in. We need this much fuel so that way there you can have the exact proper amount of air/fuel ratio.

One of the first things I want to get into about this mass air flow sensor is if it is no good, you might get an improper barometric reading, which essentially means that your vehicle may think that you're climbing a mountain when generally speaking, you're almost at sea level. So, it tries adding a little bit more air or a little less air and it's just confused on what's going on. So, you could have a runnability issue where your vehicle is running either a little bit too lean or a little too rich. A few of the other things that you might notice might be something as simple as erratic idle. Maybe the Idle's a little high, or maybe even a little bit low, which will be very common if you had an issue with the mass air flow sensor. Essentially, your vehicle doesn't know how much air is getting drawn in, so it's gonna run a little weird. You might try to step on the gas and it just doesn't want to go, low power, right? It's very common. Another thing that you might notice is you jump in the vehicle and you try to spark it up. And for some reason, it just [vocalization] because it's trying to draw air, it's trying to add fuel, and this thing just doesn't know what's going on, so, of course, the brain of the car doesn't know what's going on either. Some of the possible causes for this could be the fact that maybe inside your mass air flow sensor, you had that little metering sensor thing inside there, that could be dirty. Overall, if you run your vehicle for too long with the same air filter, it's gonna get very dirty. After a while, that dirt is gonna start pushing its way through the engine, or, you know, getting sucked through the engine, it's going to go through that little air duct, get past this little metering thing right here, and it's going to go through. It's gonna collect all that little dirt right on here. If this gets built up with too much crud, it's not going to know what's going on. The sensor itself could just be old and maybe it's just kind of out of its range, it doesn't really remember what's supposed to be going on. And, of course, it could be bad wiring. You could disconnect it and take peek in here, if you see any funny colors or even in that little connector, you know moisture got in and it could potentially have an issue with that connection. And, of course, you would wanna check the wiring that leads to that to make sure everything's copacetic with that. Some of the possible fixes would be to try to clean it and do a reset, see if that fixes the issue. If it doesn't, unfortunately, you're more than likely going to have to replace it. In which case, I would just go on 1aauto.com and check us out.

The next thing I want to talk about on this vehicle is maybe you have a check engine light on. And of course, if your vehicle is older than a '96, you might have like a CL code of like a 332, or if it's '96 through the following years, it might be something along the lines of like a P0401 or a P0402, which essentially will just mean that there's an EGR issue. That leads us to want to test the EGR pressure sensor. You want to make sure that that's working properly. If you take it out and it looks like it's all gunked up, maybe has carbon buildup from the exhaust, you want to clean it. You want to check for power and ground to make sure everything's going the way it should, connect it back in. If you still have that issue, you're going to want to move along to checking that EGR itself. Once you pull it off, you can take a peek, and if you see any carbon buildup inside there, it's going to look like black crud, you can pretty much come scraping off. You're going to want to try to clean it. If after you clean it, it still doesn't work right, you might want to replace it. But, of course, there is another thing that you'd want to check and that would be the intake. The intake that leads up to where that EGR is, you want to make sure that that's cleaned out as well. Because if those ports are clogged up with all that carbon, which can make a big difference with the airflow that's supposed to be going through there, you're going to have major issues. So, one of the first things that I would do, like I said, check that pressure sensor, make sure that it's getting power and ground, make sure it's clean. And then, of course, move along to cleaning up that EGR, clean up the intake the best you can. So, of course, once you get everything cleaned up, I would go ahead and clear that engine light and then run it. If the engine light doesn't turn back on, you know you're doing all right.

The next thing I want to talk about on these vehicles is the transmissions. Overall, these vehicles came with three different transmission and there's one in particular that gives everybody issues, and that's the 4R70W. Generally speaking, what happens with this is that you'll be driving along and maybe you notice that the transmission just slips, it doesn't stay in that gear right and you try to take off and then it wants to go. You might notice rough shifting. It's supposed to shift from first to second gear and you get like a bump in between. That's very common. Another thing that might happen as you're driving down the road, and it just doesn't seem like it wants to shift at all. Maybe it went first, second, and then it's just rev, rev, rev, rev, rev going right up. Obviously, that's an issue. There's gotta be some causes for this. And one of the things that I like to check is the mass air flow sensor. Most of these vehicles do have the mass air flow sensor, you want to make sure that it's clean and it's functioning properly. Another thing you want to check is to make sure that you're up-to-date on the maintenance on that transmission. If you haven't serviced the transmission in a long time, more than likely the fluid is no good in there and it's causing this issue. Other causes for this could be maybe you overheated the vehicle. Maybe you're driving down the road and you got stuck in a little bit of snow and you were just kinda, you know, trying to get out of that snow issue that you're in and you were just revving it, revving it, revving it, the tires are spinning, they're doing their thing and the transmission just overheats. You know what I mean? You're pumping that transmission fluid up and through the radiator cooler and everything to cool off the transmission fluid, but it just doesn't cool down enough. An overheating condition is going to cause major issues with this. Of course, also, if you're just driving around like a maniac, heavy on the gas and then heavy on the brake, back and forth, back and forth, you're jostleing that transmission around and it's trying to figure out how to shift right and it's just getting confused over time. That's gonna cause drivability issues as well.

Some of the possible fixes for this, of course, will be checked that mass air flow sensor and make sure it's clean like I said. The next thing I would do is if you haven't gone way over on your service intervals for that transmission fluid, I would go ahead and service the transmission. You replace the transmission seal or the gasket on the pan and, of course, the filter and you'd use the manufacturer specified fluid. You don't want to use any other fluid besides what's specified by the manufacturer. If for some reason you went way over on your interval and you're a little bit worried about it and you think it's just going to destroy that transmission, well the last option would be basically is to either rebuild the transmission or to replace it anyway. So, I guess theoretically, what I would do is I would try to service the transmission and see if it saves it, but more than likely, you're probably going to have to get a rebuild or replacement.

And the last thing that I want to talk to you about on this is the steering shaft. Sometimes you're driving your vehicle and you notice that it turns easy and then gets a little hard and then turns easy and gets hard. That's because of steering shaft has a whole bunch of little U-joints on it. The U-joints get frozen. Maybe they've been too close to moisture. They absorb moisture, the grease in there, and everything just kind of went away. They got rust in there, now they're binding. So, you're trying to turn that steering shaft, and the pieces are binding instead of flowing copacetically, next thing you know, you got that little bind area. That can, of course, cause issues when you're driving down the road. You don't want to be on the highway and you're trying to make a corner, but you can't make the corner because your steering is tight and all of a sudden it loosens up again, right? That's obviously a very big issue and nobody wants anybody to get hurt. Like I said, it's very common for the U-joints to be bad.

What I would do to check this would basically be to make sure that the steering wheel is in the locked position. That means that you cannot turn the steering wheel. You have the key out of the vehicle. Next thing I would do would be to remove that center shaft for the steering. You just take out the upper bolt and the lower bolt. You condense it a little bit and you can pull it out. Now, you would just kinda go like this with all of those joints. If you feel one that's loose and then tight and loose again, you know that that's the bad joint. Unfortunately, on these steering shafts, you don't just replace the joint, you replace the whole steering shaft. So, like I said, if you're turning your steering wheel and you happen to notice that it feels like it binds in one area and then loosens up, more than likely it's because of those U-joints on the steering shaft. Once again, though, make sure before you remove that steering shaft, you have your steering wheel in the locked position. You do not want that steering wheel to spin around in any way once you remove that shaft.

Okay, friends. If you need any of these parts, make sure you check out 1aauto.com. And if you like the content in this video, make sure you like, you comment, and you subscribe. And while you're at it, make sure you ring the bell, that way there you can be kept up-to-date with all of our latest content. Thanks.

Thanks for watching. Visit 1aauto.com for quality auto parts shipped to your door, the place for DIY auto repair. And if you enjoyed this video, please click the subscribe button.