Hi all,

My dearly beloved has a sub 25k miles, 2017 Fiesta 1.0 Titanium. It's a lovely little car and it replaced her previous Fiesta that she wrapped around a road sign.

This one however has been giving some problems in that it will occasioally refuse to go into gear or, as it did earlier today, come out of reverse. It's difficult to be too precise with the symptoms because firstly, it hasn't done it when I've been driving it and secondly, because any debrief with SWMBO usually ends up with her getting arsey with me because she thinks I don't believe her!

Now, I have done a fair bit of trawling the web including here and can't really find anything definitive. I have cleaned and lubricated all the linkage at the gearbox end under that plastic cover but would appreciate any tips or suggestions.

Thanks,

She's probably not pushing the clutch pedal all the way down.

Good luck telling her that...

IF there is a fault it's more likely to be the clutch dragging than the gearbox selector sticking.

Next time it happens, try switching the engine off.  If it deselects fine with the engine off, it's definitely a clutch fault.

Hi Tom,

I've just bravely attempted further debriefing and it seems that it did indeed slip in and out of gear seamlessly once she switched off the engine! A little snippet she may have omitted earlier!

So I'm with you on this, sounds like the clutch dragging. Funnily enough, when looking for info on this, I stumbled upon a video of a guy changing a clutch on one of these and looking at the splines on the gearbox when he removed, it they were pretty corroded. This would suggest to me that the friction plate could easily stick on them and not properly disengage.

I'll be pulling the box in a day or so, so will report back.

Thanks for the help.

I'm a bit late on the catch up here but I did indeed pull the box and replace the clutch and here we are a little over a year on and no further issues.

I would add, it was a surprisingly straightforward job in the end aided no end by ford seeing fit to provide somewhere to bolt a lifting eye bang in the right place on the top of the box!

Did you change the slave cylinder whilst doing the clutch? If so maybe it was that, and in particular the piston seal starting to fail. When this starts to happen pressing the clutch fast (which perhaps you do more than your wife) can still create a good seal and associated movement whereas a slower press results in it fluid passing around. Similar situation can occur at the master cylinder too.