So I've had this whirring/whinning noise everytime I push down the accelerator. My timing belt broke and my car completely died (see engine problem section). We get that fixed and the car runs good again but we still hear the whinning. Not wanting to spend any more money and figuring it wasn't a big deal we ignored it. About 6 months down the road the transmission fails.

The whirring noise was the Throw-out Bearing starting to fail. I know some cars can make it up past 200k miles before things start going bad, but lets face it, this isn't one of those cars. No matter what car you have things will eventually fail, that's the ways of mechanical workings. I personally don't think 120k miles is too bad to be replacing a transmission.

Bottom line is, if your hearing this whirring noise tell someone to check out your transmission or be prepared to hear some grinding and REALLY hard shifting. Then a dead car. It's not too fun to be stranded.

Alright, here's the deal. My husband & I noticed a whining with our vehicle for a little while now. Seemed to be whenever we depressed the accelerator. Didn't think too much of it until we went for a weekend about 3 hours away from home. Decided to go out, the car started fine and drove for about a mile and died at a stoplight. Wouldn't start back up. So far we've checked out that it is getting fuel and it is getting a spark. That's good. The next option we have that could be wrong (yes we did check the obvious gas/battery/etc.) is a timing belt.

Went to my lovely internet and found that the timing belts on Focus' should be replaced at about 120,000 miles (which by the way most other vehicles are at about 60,000). Also found that high pitched whining is a sign of your idler & tensionor pulley going out. Which most likely will only last as long as the Timing Belt.

So, there ya have it. If your up at about 120k miles you should look into getting that timing belt replaced before it gets you stranded somewhere. My local shop estimated about $700 for timing, serpentine, tensionor, idler, timing kit. Not too horrible, the Focus is a good little car. Like any vehicle ya gotta get work on it at some point.