Originally Posted By: badtlc
Originally Posted By: MGregoir
Use a good D3M fluid such as Mobil 1 ATF or Something like Amsoil ATF and I imagine things will be fine.
All the vehicles using straight Mercon are basically out of warranty now, so why does Ford care? Mercon V it is.
I believed the transmission failure issue was happening with the transmissions in Super Duty pickups and not Escapes though, not 100% on that. Use what the manual says.
No. if you paruse the escape forums, many owners have experienced tranny failures (though 99.9% of them were V6 owners, not 4-bangers). They all blamed it on switching to merconv instead of mercon.
There was also a ford rep on the sight saying the orginal CD4E transmission was calibrated for Mercon and they didn't recalibrate for MerconV until like 2005 or 2006 models. Like I said, it is a hotly contested topic with escape owners of older models and there has definitely been reliability problems with the V6/ATX combination, but not the 4-cyl/ATX even though they use the same ATX.
Another perspective on this topic.
I frequent Escape Central. I'm a former Ford Service Manager/Shop Manager/Service Adviser/Technician. One of the more recent Ford shops I worked in (I wasn't the top manager in the service department) made the arbitrary decision that Mercon V went into everything serviced that was a 98 model or newer, and Mercon went into everything service that was built prior to 98. They built their pricing menus around that, and that is what the technicians followed as directed by the Service Director. I would like to emphasize that this was not my choice, as I would have followed service manual and technical publication recommendations with only rare exceptions.
What is significant though, is that we DID NOT experience transmission failure from using Mercon V. Of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of Escapes that received trans fluid exchanges, not one of them came back with trans problems. In fact Escape trans failures in general were RARE (much unlike my experience in a Honda dealership).
At Escape Central there was a Ford engineer that used to frequent the forum. This was in the early days of the Escape. She did in fact post that Ford did not recommend Mercon V for the Escape. I have the impression that either she knew that there were problems with the early Mercon V blendings or that she was being careful not to recommend something that had not been validated. Either way, there is one very frequent poster that picked up the anti-Mercon V mantra and has dogmatically run with it ever since. He and a few of his followers have chased off some posters that expressed that they were not having problems with Mercon V. They have also jumped on "Oh, you had a trans failure? It must have been from Mercon V".
If Escape transmissions were indeed dropping like flies due to swapping to Mercon V this fact would be all over. It isn't. It isn't even as strong of a topic at Escape Central as it once was.
