"OK to Buy" Date

[alfredfife]

I have seen a lot of posts on some 2011 Explorer forums about a so called "OK to buy" date. It is describe as the date that Ford begins to build vehicles that are retail orders for customers and not just dealer stock orders.

Supposedly Explorers built after this date have an advantage of all the experience of stock orders and a lot of the early bugs have been corrected.

Anyone know anything about if this is true and what the "OK to buy" date might be?

 

[edge929]

Yes it's true. Ford (and I would assume most all manufacturers) do this for all new models and refreshes of existing models. The OK to Build date was given around Dec 1st 2010 for the 2011 Explorer. Mass production started in November so they had a month to work out the big kinks. Seeing how they are up to ~25,000 build number as of today, it's safe to assume anything after 8,000 will be safe. With that said, they are and will continually find other issues (most recent was a reclining lever on the bench 2nd row seat). Comes with the territory of all new vehicles.

 

[alfredfife]

Thank you for that explanation. It helped a lot. My Explorer is in production this week so I should be OK. If the weather lets up and the plant reopens.