With shades of the infamous "Pinto Memo," Ford engineers have told the Detroit Free Press that "everyone knew" about the defective automatic transmissions in the Fiesta and Focus models. Seven engineers and employees, both current and former employees, talked about the difficulties with the transmission and the pressure to keep concerns under wraps.

The Fiesta and Focus models have been plagued with transmission problems for their DPS6 dual clutch PowerShift that have resulted in lawsuits and a federal criminal probe.

3 Considered Not a Safety Hazard

via caranddriver.com

The Detroit Free Press had reported in July that Ford had known about the issues with the transmission in the 2010-2011 model years for the Fiesta and Focus but didn't consider the cars slipping into neutral a safety hazard, releasing the cars anyway.

The paper had obtained internal documents showing the company ignored lawyers and engineer concerns and refused to change the pricey transmission technology.

2 Rushed to Production

via gannett-cdn.com

The transmissions were rushed to market in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis with gas prices reaching $4/gallon as an alternative to manual transmissions and their traditional mileage advantage that has eroded over time.

The transmissions would cause the cars to shutter violently and often shift randomly. Since the transmissions were designed to default to neutral when encountering issues drivers would lose power intermittently.

1 Engineers Voiced Concern

via wikimedia.org

Since the initial report in the Free Press, engineers and employees have reached out to reveal the push to put the transmissions on the market despite flaws. The issue revolves around the decision to make the dual clutch system a 'dry clutch' set up rather than having oil lubricate the system. The employees reported that Ford had reached a point of no return on the faulty clutch saying, “How do you solve it? They had implemented the flawed transmission and any fix was going to be super expensive."