I drive a 2013 Ford Focus and have had the transmission serviced twice in the 26k miles its been driven. There's at least a 1-2 second delay in acceleration lag when I need to accelerate quickly; and it's gotten to the point where I consciously try to avoid those situations. I guess it has made me a more cautious driver, if I want to look on the bright side.<p>Luckily, I've never had it slip into neutral on the highway or randomly accelerate, but I have had it refuse to shift into a higher gear while getting onto the freeway. The issue would only resolve once I pulled to the side of the road and completely turned off the car and started it back up.<p>Definitely going to replace the car once it's paid off in January.
Subtitle: "The carmaker says that it's not a safety problem if your car slips into neutral on the highway."<p>It might not be a safety issue (and of course it is, who do you think you're kidding?), but it's illegal in the two states for which I've looked it up (my home state of IN, and current residence of WA). Here's WA's law:
<a href="https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.630" rel="nofollow">https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.630</a>
This is a great peace of reporting. The amount of research and investigation put into this, the interviews with insiders, the look inside the engineering process, internal company emails, etc.<p>It shines an extraordinary light onto this catastrophic failure. And in this case, truly, the engineers do not come out looking good at all.
This pdf has pictures of the guts of this transmision:<p><a href="https://atracom.blob.core.windows.net/webinars/ford/dps6_internal_operation.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://atracom.blob.core.windows.net/webinars/ford/dps6_int...</a><p>I drive a stick, but recently I have been driving my moms's automatic subaru and it has a really nice crawl feature for steep dirt roads. You put the car in x-mode, take your foot off the gas and the car will maintain the speed you are at regardless of changes in grade or traction. You can adjust the speed with momentary application of brake and gas pedals. The computer controls throttle and brakes on each individual wheel, you can hear the ABS on downhill grades. Anyway it was the first automatic I have driven that worked well enough to be better then a stick for my use cases.
GM declined to use a dry clutch DCT in their performance vehicles for this very reason. GM was able to anticipate this problem, you need to have a wet DCT to avoid these problems. When you have a dry clutch manual transmission the human leg compensates for the variability in the driving conditions that ford wants the computer to handle. A torque converter is much more reliable in these types of vehicles.
The implied cause of the T-bone accident in the article is wrong; a transmission slipping into gear while stopped would stall a small idling engine like what would be in a Focus. That would be the throttle body issue, which in my opinion should have been the focus of the article over crap transmissions<p>Edit: better article -
<a href="https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles/nhtsa-opens-investigation-into-2005-2012-ford-escape-vehicles-following-petition-from-nccc.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles/nhtsa-opens-investi...</a>
My family has always been a Toyota/Honda family but my sister broke from the pack and bought a Ford Focus. She had to replace the transmission within a year. Once she sells it, if she buys another car, she's going back to Toyota/Honda.
I don’t understand why so many customers are still fretting about paying off the vehicle.<p>Ford knowingly sold m, and continued to sell a faulty product. The warrantee is irrelevant: those customers should be able to return for a full refund, including load interest. End of story.