NHTSA Complaint #11631199 — 2013 FORD FOCUS

I started experiencing intermittent (what seems like transmission) Issues about a little over a year ago. It would randomly occur and usually after the engine was warmed up and I had been driving a lot that day. It would only occur from a dead stop and then starting to accelerate from 1st to 2nd gear. The RPMs would go way high but the car wouldn’t accelerate I would let off the gas and then give it a little gas right away and it would seem to “grab” and the car wouldn’t accelerate start to go. It has over time increasingly gotten worse increasing from just 1st to 2nd gear and now 2nd to 3rd gear. I have a transmission that is a dual clutch transmission so it is an automatic but when I want to I can put my gear shifter into “S” mode (sport mode) and the car then acts as a manual transmission needing the driver to change gears by pushing a + or a - button on the gear shifter either when accelerating or downshifting gears. It never acted up in “S” Mode only during automatic driving until recently. What sparked my need to write in about this is when I was driving down the freeway the car all of a sudden lost power but the RPMs accelerated up into the Red zone on my tachometer. Essentially I was dead driving 60 mph down the freeway and quickly losing speed cars were swerving around me and one almost rear ended me. It put my life and the life of my passengers all at risk and it was scary! I had a good friend of mine who is an ASE Certified mechanic look at the car and he couldn’t see anything wrong but because this happens intermittently I wouldn’t expect the problem to occur for him during a five min test drive. However it doesn’t change the severity of what I have been experiencing. There was a previous recall on my vehicle for this transmission and these exact problems and although it was repaired (under a different owner) I am experiencing the same issues. Maybe the replacement transmission was also faulty? since my “service transmission” light came on as well.