OK, this is crazy. Just bought this as a city car for my daughter and her child. Saturday they are driving and all four of the gauges start jumping all over the place, this lasted for 10 minutes then it stopped with the RPM indicator buried and not moving. This freed up the next day but the tip of the indicator was bent. Yesterday it happened to the temp and RPM gauges only with the RPM buried again. Now the transmission indicator is stuck in park but the transmission moves properly.

On my way to a local dealer to find out the damage.

This vehicle was given to me about a year and a half ago , the previous owner had it for years and had very few problems with it , when it was given to me soon after i started noticing that it was extremely difficult to get to the proper driving speed. I tried using my street which is roughly 40 blocks or so (guessing) and i could not AT ALL get the van up to 50 km/hour (the speed limit on my street) before reaching the end of it. I soon realized that it wasnt me not going fast enough, it was the van not knowing how fast i was really going.

I am an apprentice auto mechanic and thought it should be fairly easy to fix with the right information, however i am quickly learning that this is a VERY common problem for this model year and is known to be caused by a poorly designed heat sink in the ECM module that overheats causing wires to become disconnected.

Ford will always be my automaker of choice because it is what i learned to work on and have always found them simpler than other cars. However Ford needs to make some of their professional information more available.

for instance there is a test mode on the gauge cluster of this vehicle , using this test mode i was able to retrieve several diagnostic codes from the vehicle, however there is NOWHERE that i can find any information regarding what these codes represent. I dont expect a road map printed out and handed to me on a silver platter but come on

How hard is it to put up a chart with a list of possible codes and their corresponding error messages.

This problem is unbelievably irritating!!! They say I need a new gauge cluster but can't find it in junk yards. And even if I do it has to be installed at a dealership so they can program the new one. The kicker is that until it's installed I won't even know if that cluster is any good (or if that will even fix the problem)!!

I've been ignoring it for awhile all the gages would flap like crazy and then go back to normal after a few minutes but now it's bad. Every bump makes the needles jump, it's only working 25% of the time. Can't rely on the gas gage but at least the message center tell me how many miles till empty and that's pretty accurate and isn't affected by the gages.

I'm getting rid of this pos if anyone is reading this they should do the same. It's one problem after another w/this car!!

One day i was driving my 2000 ford wind star when all of a sudden all of dashboards dials started going out of control. When i would start the car again it would resume back to normal for a while then go crazy again. It became more then a nuisance when i couldn't put the car in park because the needle of the RPM dial was blocking where i would put the car in the park gear. I wasn't able no take my foot off the gas, or turn the car off,or get my keys out of the car, so i drove to a gas station and called for an attendant to help me. He got the car in park but bent the RPM needle to get it there. When i went inside to see the boss he asked if i had a Ford Wind star because he has seen the clusters go all the time in that car. To my amazement, i said yes.