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by Knight0fNever 2539 days ago
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.

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.

Definitely going to replace the car once it's paid off in January.

2 comments

I've observed the 1-2 second delay in multiple 'eco' mode automatic transmissions. I just did a roadtrip in a kia sportage and the lag was brutal on the freeway, especially when trying to pass. I drive a stick so maybe I'm more sensitive than others..
I owned a 2013 Ford Focus as well. In the nine months of ownership, the transmission was replaced twice. Every transmission worked fairly well and then after about a month would start to stutter on acceleration and acceleration would lag then accelerate quickly startling me.

I was so glad to get rid of that car.

Cannot say if it is exactly the same issue, but it seems that the Ford mechanics (at least here) are not trained to repair them and are not even capable of finding what the actual "root" issue is.

Additionally it seems that Ford has not found a good procedure to revive the transmission (i.e. new or rehauled transmission fail the same way).

A number of out-of-warranty cars (not that having Ford do anything effective within the warranty period is in any way easy) here in Italy (Focus and S-Max) have been seemingly recovered by using a special procedure to wash/clean the transmission of the old fluid, put in new "special" one + additives (and replace the filter) , then there is the need (via ODB2) to reset/calibrate the gearbox electronics.

The same or similar issue affects/affected also the DSG-7 gearbox mounted on many VW's/small Audi's (and Sjoda's/Seat's).