Ford Employees Claim They Knew About The Defective PowerShift Transmission

The saga surrounding Ford and the defective transmissions in the Ford Focus and Fiesta models continues, with a number of Ford employees breaking their silence and admitting that the gearbox was indeed faulty and everybody knew about it.

In a bombshell report, The Detroit Free Press spoke to numerous Ford employees who claim that speaking up during the development of the Focus and Fiesta regarding the poor transmission proved fruitless, as Ford was determined to bring the cars to the market, despite itself knowing about the gearbox problems.

“My hands are dirty. I feel horrible,” one Ford engineer who helped develop the Focus and Fiesta said. “You think of the gentleman who stood up for the space shuttle Challenger, saying if they launched that with the ice on it that it’s going to blow up. Well, these kinds of really horrific technical errors seemed to pass right through at Ford on this project.

“We’d raise our hands and be told, ‘Don’t be naysayers.’ We got strange comments. It seemed the ship had sailed,” he added. “After that, if you ask questions, you’re accused of mutiny, so you put your head down and make it work. Good people tried to make it work. But you can’t violate the laws of physics. It’s a mechanical catastrophe.”

Things Get Worse: Did Ford Knowingly Launch Focus And Fiesta With Defective PowerShift Transmissions?

Ford introduced its PowerShift dual-clutch transmission with the 2011 model year Fiesta and then the 2012 model year Focus. The transmission remained in use in the Focus through the 2018 model year and through the Fiesta’s 2019 model year. Thousands of complaints have been made about it, with many customers finding it unexpectedly slipping into neutral. The transmission proved so problematic because it used dry clutch technology as opposed to a wet-clutch design, creating an inconsistent friction coefficient and creating problems, one engineer revealed.

“The idea should’ve been killed,” the same engineer commented. “No one knew how it was even considered — and then implemented — in the Focus and Fiesta. But they got to this point in the product development cycle where Ford realized they passed the point of no return. They spent a ton of money and here’s this giant problem. How do you solve it? They had implemented the flawed transmission and any fix was going to be super expensive.”

In July, a separate report from The Detroit Free Press alleged that Ford knew about the faulty transmission but pushed ahead with rolling it out in the Fiesta and Focus. There are roughly 13,000 individual lawsuits concerning this particular issue. In May, Ford offered a settlement deal of $35 million to current and former owners of 2012-2016 Focus and 2011-2016 Fiesta models, but this settlement remains under review as it’s been considered too favorable for Ford.