That trans issue is what puts MANY of them in the scrapyards as the engines (at least the four) go easily to very often well over 200K miles.
My cost back in '07 was well over $600 in parts alone and bought at trans shop vendor pricing, no way can you buy that cheap say online. I figure with the completeness of the job I did it would cost the normal guy at least $3k alone but then I do that good a quality of work. No way will you get that amount of detail out of a normal shop environment and why they fail so many, I saw even client Ford dealerships we had when I was in parts, they were having to rebuild them over and over on the same vehicles when they tore up as soon as driven. Beware the shop idiot who says he can do the entire R&R for $1500-$2000, he is telling you he is too stupid to do that one. The trans demands an expert, you don't simply throw a bunch of parts at one like in the old days. The high cost of parts was because when that drum breaks it is a drum inside another drum and that inside even another, the parts coming loose literally grind up into much smaller pieces doing that then they tear up everything else. I bought at least 5 different drums and intentionally kept a 6th one in that looked like a bomb went off inside it just as a personal joke to myself and to befuzzle anybody who might get the car after me.
Yes, a waste like owning a Focus with the SPI engine in it that tears up often way early to ruin everything as well. Ford is building crap and unlike the old days when they used to try to improve major issues like that they now simply let them continue to break as it sells far more parts and cars to do so. Just witness all the thousands of DCT Powershift cars made since '12 that they endlessly put clutches and modules in over and over yet nothing fixes the issues.
Why I have jumped to another brand after being a Ford person for 35 years and a long stream of them. You can see it get worse and worse and I'm done with that now. The cars are now being designed to break what I call nuisance items, the ones you endlessly change or don't and they then pile up to make you want another new car. Look at the new parts right out of the box, you can usually tell ahead of time where they will break now and wait till it happens and you see you were right. I can't count how many times that's happened. I recently counted a failure rate on one of my Focus cars when dared to and came up with more than 50 separate breakages on a '02 model car. Utterly ridiculous, the cars are junk, and the higher end ones are no better, they use the same crap parts predestined to break.
