Ford knowingly sold 2 flawed models
Company says Focus, Fiesta are safe despite owners’ complaints
Ford Motor Co. knowingly launched two low-priced, fuel-efficient cars with defective transmissions and continued selling the troubled Focus and Fiesta despite thousands of complaints and an avalanche of repairs, a Detroit Free Press investigation found.
The cars, many of which randomly lose power on freeways and have unexpectedly bolted into intersections, were put on sale in 2010-11 as the nation emerged from the Great Recession.
At least 1.5 million remain on the road and continue to torment their owners – and Ford.
The automaker pushed past company lawyers’ early safety questions and a veteran development engineer’s warning that the cars weren’t roadworthy, internal emails and documents show.
Ford then declined, after the depth of the problem was obvious, to make an expensive change in the transmission technology, the Free Press discovered.
Instead, the company kept trying to find a fix for the faulty transmission for five years while complaints and costs piled up.
In the interim, Ford officials prepared talking points for dealers to tell customers that the cars operated normally when, in fact, internal documents are peppered with safety concerns and descriptions of the defects.
The cars in question are the Fiesta, starting with the 2011 model year, and the Focus, starting with the 2012 model year. The Focus was discontinued after the ’17 model, and the ’19 Fiesta is the last of the line as Ford emphasizes trucks and SUVs.
The automaker faces thousands of angry customers, including former loyalists who say they will never buy another Ford; hundreds of millions in repair costs, many times without actually fixing the cars; and litigation so serious the company this spring disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission the financial risk posed by defects in what Ford called its DPS6 transmission.
Apart from the legal risks, “Total quality related spending for DPS6 could reach $3 billion,” read a 2016 in
ternal report that projected the costs through 2020. While Ford has extended the warranties on the vehicles and issued numerous updates for the cars, they were never recalled for transmission repair.
The Free Press reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court filings from the past decade in which Ford engineers and managers discussed concerns and sought to control damage from the dual-clutch transmission, which enabled the company to tout gas mileage near 40 mpg on the highway.
The Free Press also analyzed consumer complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, finding accounts of 50 previously unreported injuries amid more than 4,300 entries about the unreliable transmissions.
No deaths are publicly known to have been linked to the defect.
In a statement Wednesday to the Free Press, Ford said many buyers were unaccustomed to the feel of the transmission, leading to complaints, but acknowledged that, “After the new transmission was on the road, other problems developed. We acted quickly and determinedly to investigate the problems . ... While we eventually resolved the quality issues, the solutions were more complex and took longer than we expected.
“We regret the inconvenience and frustration that caused some consumers.” It acknowledged discussion of switching to a different transmission and said it made choices based on what it thought “best for customers.”
Ford’s position has consistently been that even if the cars slip out of gear while people are driving and they must coast to the side of the road, the cars don’t pose a safety risk because power steering, brakes, passenger restraints and other functions continue to work. Its statement to the Free Press for this story reiterated that “vehicles in which DPS6 was installed were and remain safe.”
Others believe the cars are dangerous, including thousands of vehicle owners, a leading consumer safety advocate and a longtime former Ford quality engineer who spoke to the Free Press about troubleshooting meetings of which he was part in 2010.
Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer advocacy group, was puzzled why the vehicles have not been recalled to fix the transmissions.
“Four thousand complaints would certainly get our attention. That’s too many to ignore,” he said. “Incidents involving an inability to accelerate suggests that the threat is not just to owners of these vehicles but others on the road . ... Fact is, unintentionally losing power on the highway can lead to crash deaths.”
NHTSA told the Free Press in June that it “conducted a pre-investigative review of the relevant information in 2014 and elected not to open an investigation.
“The agency has monitored the situation since that time.”
‘Lessons Learned’
A high-level, confidential analysis by Ford in 2012 acknowledged rushing the cars to production, taking shortcuts to save money and apparently compromising quality protocols instituted with fanfare by then-CEO Alan Mulally. It was in that review, obtained by the Free Press, that Ford said the transmissions would be phased out and a different technology used, but that didn’t happen.
By the time of the 2012 review, which was labeled “Lessons Learned,” Ford had sold more than half a million of the cars.
“There is no fix at this time,” system testing engineer Tom Hamm wrote separately in an October 2012 email to four colleagues.
The report noted “trade-offs” of performance in favor of cost and fuel economy. It said use of a dry clutch rather than a wet clutch led to harsh shifting and other issues.
The DPS6 is different from the automatic transmissions most people are used to, but it operates the same way: Shift to Drive or Reverse and go.
The guts of a dual-clutch transmission like the DPS6 are more like a manual than a conventional automatic transmission, but the driver does not have to shift gears.
These transmissions can improve fuel economy and weigh less than a conventional automatic, key reasons Ford developed the DPS6.
Internal warnings
Many within Ford foresaw the problems, according to materials obtained by the Free Press, which included 41 lawsuit exhibits filed in customer litigation. Thirty-one exhibits in that set of lawsuits remain out of public view.
The documents show that Ford lawyers told engineers in 2008 they were worried about the safety of the dualclutch technology, which had encountered problems during early use by Volkswagen in Europe.
Ford would be putting this transmission into low-priced, high-volume vehicles for the first time.
Corporate lawyers maintained, as noted in emails by engineers, that the transmissions’ tendency to slip out of gear, if combined with other conditions, would result in a “Severity 10” rating. That’s the worst possible rating under global engineering protocols designed to minimize risk and comply with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards set by the U.S. government.
The cars and transmission technology were critical to Ford at the time. The vehicles were developed as the company lost more than $30 billion from 2006-08.
Development of the 2011 Fiesta was plagued with problems.
“At each early checkpoint, it became more apparent” that the transmission systems for the 2011 Fiesta program “were not capable to meet customer expectations,” the 2012 review said. As the project progressed toward launch, “issues increased rather than declined.”
After the Fiesta was on the market in early 2010, that August, just six months before the 2012 Focus went on sale, product development engineer Tom Langeland emailed colleagues and supervisors describing “nasty launch judder” – intense vibration from a stop – that “did not clear up after many miles of driving.”
“We also cannot achieve a driveable calibration that will get us to production,” he wrote.