My car's radio glitches and shut itself off and then turned back on. Then we began to smell something burning or different. As the heater hadn't been on in a while we figured it was that. Then the car began to stall and sound bad. Pulled over and checked the air filter as I knew that needed replaced. That didn't affect anything. Had a friend who is a great mechanic look at it and found out the sparkplugs and some wires needed replaced. While he was under the hood fixing that the next day, there was a huge electrical short, the fire causing kind. It put a hole about the size of a pencil eraser in the EGR tube. Car ran ok, however Carbon Monoxide was leaking into the front of the car, but still driveable. Covered the hole with heat tape good up til 500 degrees F. The car started acting funny, so I pulled over. The EGR burned through the heat tape, and the car won't even turn over so right now we are pretty sure that it burnt through the starter wires. Contacted a local Mercury dealership and was told that the part was discontinued. So currently I am looking at used parts while my car sits. My biggest problem with this whole incident is that if I would have been driving my car when it had the big short, it would have caught on fire. Yet there is no recalls or any other type of information forewarning this.