At 8,700 miles the problems with the GT have been, gratefully, few and far between. There were two two recent scares, but both proved non-GT related.
First, the reception from the Sirius satellite radio has been cutting out, even moreso than usual. I generally like Sirius' radio programming more than XM's, but XM has it all over Sirius when it comes to signal strength. Of course they are one-in-the-same now, so maybe Sirius' signal will get stronger (but will the quality of their programming get weaker...). Anyway, I feared the placement of the antenna was causing the issue, as I didn't want to mount it on the outside of the car and hoped the dash-mounted location would be good enough. Well, the day after driving the GT and having massive signal drop out I drove another test car with Sirius radio and suffered the exact same level of drop out in the exact same places on my commute. Obviously the problem is Sirius, versus a serious problem with my receiver or antenna placement.
The other problem had to do with ride quality at freeway speeds. It felt like one or more of the GT's wheels were out of balance, as there was a weird, intermittant vibration between 60 and 80 mph. I wanted to believe it was related to the road quality, but it happened over a large section of L.A. freeway. Well, just yesterday I drove a BMW 335i coupe over the same stretch of L.A. freeway and felt the exact same intermittant vibration for approximately 15 miles (it's the 101 southbound just north of the 405 interchange). Like Sirius, Los Angeles really needs to upgrade its equipment.
Maybe it's the Ford GT's exotic nature that makes one assume the worst when an apparent problem arises. But after 8,700 essentially trouble-free miles perhaps it's time to start assuming the best.
Karl Brauer, Editor in Chief, Edmunds.com @ 8,700 miles
dgcamero says:
12:18 PM, 05/30/07
I noticed that around the month of December, most Sirius stations got a significant increase in sound quality. This caused my radio to lose signal all the time (it rarely cut out before). My guess is that they just cranked up the bandwidth which can cause some of the older units with smaller buffers (like the one I had) to break up more frequently. The latest generation unit that I purchased in early January rectifies the situation I'm assuming with a much larger buffer (never ever breaks up in my city, only rarely in the boon-docks I frequent). Sirius was even nice enough to credit my account a bit (half-ish of the cost of the new system) since I had to pay to get acceptable quality.
I agree with you 100% about Sirius being better than XM. If I wanted Clear Channel, I could just listen to the radio.