Sharing what I’ve been told is an unusual failure on wife’s Flex. It’s a 2015 naturally aspirated FWD SEL model, purchased as a second owner at our current location in Italy. We bought it in February 2020 with approximately 50,000 miles and then had a failure of the input shaft at 65,000 miles. The local dealers & shops really didn’t want anything to do with it and quoted a 7K euro replacement job. I’m in the Air Force as a Vehicle Maintenance & Fleet Manager, so I decided to tackle the troubleshooting and eventual repairs. Symptoms of the failure were a “drive failure” warning on the dash while the wife was driving and loss of throttle response, and then no-reverse. She couldn’t recall anything significant happening leading up to the failure.

The ECUs put the car in a fail-safe, no throttle pedal response mode. She was able to pull onto a side road and into a driveway to try and turn around, but was unable to back out of the driveway. She encountered a concerned Italian homeowner whose driveway she was blocking,luckily he didn’t need to leave and called his son who spoke some English to get the situation sorted. By that time I arrived to do some quick guessing as to what was wrong, but the no-reverse was leading me down the path of a failed solenoid. I limped the car home for 7 miles, encountering a very harsh shift attempt into third gear, one sign of the failure as I learned later on.

I started by draining the fluid to look for any signs of major failure, but nothing out of the ordinary came out with the fluid. Next I filled the transmission back up and bought a medium range pressure testing kit and proceeded to use the ProDemand troubleshooting steps where I could. All of the pressures were within specification, so I was left with no choice but to pull the transmission and see what happened. One 6-8 hour working session later and the transmission was on the ground with the large cover assembly removed.

The portion of the input shaft (item 6) that secures the “direct clutch cylinder snap ring (item 1)” failed, which explained the lack of reverse and hard attempt to shift into third gear.

I ordered everything needed to replace the input shaft and cover, replace the filter at the pump, replaced the shift solenoid filter plate, and reassembled according to Prodemand’s guide using a couple of 3D printed tools in place of the Ford specific ones called out. A few hours of reinstallation and it drives as it should again. Total cost was about $1,000 USD for all of the soft parts that were recommended to be swapped out (snap rings, seals, pistons, etc.). I did not replace the friction plates on the input shaft as they were well above the replacement tolerance and looked great. I hope this helps anyone that has this problem in the future, please let me know if you have any questions.