My wife and I share a 2013 Ford Focus with about 80k miles. It has a 6-speed Powershift transmission, which is a robotically driven manual transmission. To the driver it appears to be a conventional automatic, but under the hood it's a different beast. When it works, it's great, getting excellent mileage and peppy performance. My wife can't drive a manual, and has no interest in learning, so for us it's an auto or nothing.
The 2013 Focus has known issues with the transmission and the TCM. So far the actual transmission in our car has never had a problem as far as I can tell. We recently had a break down due to the transmission control module 100+ miles from home, and we ended up with a big towing bill only partially offset by the lifetime drivetrain warranty we have on the car. Ford also has their own extended warranty on the car, which means that replacement of the TCM was completely covered.
Consumer Reports has this car listed as a 1/5 on reliability both overall and for the transmission. These are just relative ratings, but from what I understand, CR doesn't give a 1 or 2 unless more than 3% of the survey respondents report an issue with the car. This is somewhat helpful, but I wish CR shared the raw data (or maybe they do and I just haven't found it). I don't care whether the car is relatively less reliable than other cars, only the percentage of car owners reporting reliability issues. I'm also not sure whether the replacement updated TCM now in our car is thought to be any more reliable than the original TCM.
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out whether to just keep it or sell and get something else. Well are FI, own the car outright, and mainly use the car for interstate car trips. Only a few of the miles we put on it are local miles, since we can walk almost anywhere. We probably put about 5-6k miles on it per year since buying it two years ago. Our living arrangement is somewhat temporary, so I'm reluctant to sell and not replace (anticipating this as a suggestion).
What say you all? Keep or replace?