NHTSA Complaint #11481637 — 2014 FORD FOCUS

After the engine light had been on for about a day and before I remembered to get it looked at, an alarm indicating "transmission fault" suddenly came on when I was in the middle of an intersection and the car completely stopped moving and wouldn't accelerate. Other cars went around me, but I was stuck there until I was able to restart the engine and try again and pull over. If another driver had not been paying attention, it could have caused an accident. This occurred at a four way stop, but on a busier street it might have been worse. We were able to get it driving again after restarting, and the independent mechanic diagnosed it with multiple error codes from the transmission control module. They reset the error codes to get it out of second gear and advised us that the TCM would need to be replaced soon. When reaching out to multiple Ford dealers and customer support representatives, we were told that though the TCM issues were under extended warrenty the replacement TCM part are backordered and we were offered no guidance on when parts would arrive and were told others had been waiting for months, so we have no recourse to fix the faulty system and were offered no compensation or assistance in the meantime. It has so far been about 6 weeks since the incident and have no updates. As a family with one car, this leaves us unable to trust that our only vehicle and we have needed to rent cars at great expense for longer trips.