Last week I had the joy of experiencing a short in the wiring of our 2000 Windstar. I took a picture so I could share the most annoying aspect of the short: no speedometer. I was driving down the road at this moment (not just revving the engine while stationary). You can see the RPMs lit up, the speedometer at 0 and the odometer showing only “———”.

Stupid Fords
Numerous other things are non-functioning as well thanks to this short (abs, power sliding door, transmission) and apparently only a Ford dealer can fix it since the computer will have to be reprogrammed. Nice. It will probably cost a small fortune in addition to the fact that we just bought this in October and it happened the day after we bought it. The car sales place told us it was just a fuse and put a new one in. This time that didn’t fix it.
Wish there was something you could do about the dealer that sold you the car in these cases. Ah well, two years to pay it off and tons of cash to repair it.