Ford knew cars defective
Transmission flaws lead to random stops, starts
Ford Motor 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. After the depth of the problem was obvious, Ford declined 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, hundreds of millions of dollars in repair costs and litigation. This spring, the company disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission the financial risk posed by defects in Ford’s DPS6 transmission.
“Total quality related spending for DPS6 could reach $3 billion,” according to an internal report in 2016 that projected the costs through 2020. Though Ford 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 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, but it said, “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 work.
Others argue 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 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.
“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.”
The 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 confidential analysis by Ford in 2012 acknowledged rushing the cars to production and taking shortcuts to save money. By the time of that review, 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 in an email to four colleagues in October 2012.
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. The guts of a dual-clutch transmission such as 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.
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.
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. The vehicles
were developed as the company lost more than $30 billion from 2006-08.
The recession sent General Motors and Chrysler to bankruptcy in 2009, but Ford survived thanks to a $23 billion line of credit secured in late 2006, in Alan Mulally’s early months as CEO. But Ford was hardly out of the woods. Sales of its cash cow, the F-Series pickup, plummeted as gas prices surged and construction activity froze. Mulally told lenders he would cut costs and boost development of fuel-efficient cars.
Responding to lawyers’ concerns as the transmission was developed, Ford quality supervisor Johann Kirchhoffer wrote in an email June 27, 2008: “We have evidence that VW had a recall of a number of transmissions with a potential ‘Unintended Neutral’ occurring with low volumes. We are pursuing any effort to reduce the occurrence of an ‘Unintended Neutral’ event to a so-called ‘Broadly Acceptable level.’ ”
“Unintended neutral” refers to the transmission slipping out of gear.
Kirchhoffer wrote that the legal “team has evidence that this event is customer safety critical.”
On Oct. 3, 2008, Ford engineer Greg Goodall proposed a technical solution, but it’s unclear from the documents available to the Free Press if the plan was used or how Ford resolved the legal questions. The coming years showed that the neutral events were not fixed.
‘Issues increased’
Development of the 2011 Fiesta was plagued with problems.
“At each early checkpoint, it became more apparent” that the transmission systems “were not capable to meet customer expectations,” the 2012 review said. As the project progressed, “issues increased rather than declined.”
After the Fiesta was on the market in early 2010, that August, six months before the 2012 Focus went on sale, product development engineer Thomas Langeland emailed colleagues and supervisors describing “nasty launch judder” – intense vibration from a stop – that “did not clear up after many miles of driving.”
A month before the Focus went to dealers, Craig Renneker, acting director of transmission and driveline engineering, emailed Richard Bonifas, a customer service manager at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, where the cars were built. “The 2012 Focus vehicles equipped with the DPS6 transmission may experience a shudder/shake on start up or when slowing to a stop … ship the vehicles to the dealers with the level of shudder we currently have and continue our efforts towards a permanent resolution ASAP,” Renneker wrote Feb. 21, 2011. “That’s just my opinion and it’s not a popular one.”
Eight months later, a Saginaw driver in a 2012 Focus that had been driven 500 miles reported this to the NHTSA: “I was stopped at a parking lot exit waiting to enter a thoroughfare, engine idling, with my foot lightly on the brake. Suddenly, the car accelerated forward, into the traffic lane, as though someone had pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor. I took a 45 mph T-bone on my driver’s side door.” The driver reported that his “elderly wife suffered a severe heart bruising from the seat belt.”