To put it less diplomatically, a carelessly driven or accident-prone Explorer will roll over and crush you.Americans are certainly prone to auto-suggestion, and the Explorer roll-over phenomenon became a Salem witch-hunt – even Monica Lewinsky had a well-publicised tumble in her Explorer – but in January 2001 it went official. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that the Explorer had a 30 to 40 per cent chance of capsizing in an accident. And while exactly the same figure would in theory apply to a Chevy or a Jeep SUV, all the mud stuck to the Ford. In this it is, perhaps, tempting to see some underlying consumer disenchantment at Ford's entrenched conservatism.

But the Explorer's fall from grace was accelerated by an infamous problem with disintegrating Firestone tyres – exacerbating the roll-over problem – which Ford handled with calamitous ineptitude. A sequence of slippery denials was followed by reluctant admissions of a problem, which led to Ford offering to re-tyre hundreds of thousands of Explorers, a recall programme that cost the company billions in cash and even more in esteem. And on the way to this industrial calamity, Ford's pugnacious chief executive officer, Jac Nasser, had managed to insult Firestone's Japanese owners, to embarrass the Firestone family (which has long historical family connections with the Fords) and, perhaps most damaging of all, to alienate Americans by going on television to explain the "issues". Nasser is Australian and had not reckoned that most Americans had not realised he was a foreigner.The Explorer muddle was only the most expensive of a handful of recent business disasters that have shown that, if nothing else, Ford retains an absolute genius for bad PR In recent years, Nasser has been on a spending binge. He bought Volvo and Land Rover for Ford, but despite excellent products, like Jaguar (an earlier acquisition), they are not making enough money and they distract management from the primary product: restoring the credibility and desirability of cars with a blue oval badge. Most ridiculously, Ford bought the UK exhaust retailer Kwik-Fit for $1.5bn and soon sold it for half that without realising the assumed benefits of claiming the customer after he had left the showroom.

Meanwhile, on the racing circuits of the world, every other weekend in the season, the Jaguar Formula One programme (which exists to generate favourable images of sporting achievement and technological superiority) consistently presents a picture of managerial chaos and unreliable product... at an estimated annual cost of $120m (£76m).Nasser's expansionist strategy might have worked in a rising market, but it was catastrophic in a recession. Nasser has now gone and Ford is certainly in crisis, but is not going bankrupt At least not yet. Recent reports that the company has $150bn of debt doesn't show the full picture. Ford may have corporate debt of $14bn, but it also has $25bn in cash, so is comfortably liquid.