On 4 separate occassions, my 2009 Ford Taurus limited automatic transmission dropped out of gear while I was accelerating slowly away from a stop The times they have occurred Is from a stop sign into traffic. It dropped out of gear at about 5 mph and made a growling noise.. I put my foot on the brake. When I started it again everything worked fine.. I was leaving a parking lot and I had reached a speed of 5-15 mph when there was no longer any gear, then it slammed into gear for a moment, went a few feet, then dropped out again, then slammed into gear again. I was able to coast to the curb in a residential area and turn the engine off. Fortunately no traffic was coming.Another time I pulled into traffic and slipped out of gear Iwas able to back up only and parked it. Then several hours later I started the engine again and had no further trouble. so far. I was checking out recalls and service bulletins on it today and I found that other owners reported similar problems. If I had been pulling out into traffic and my transmission failed the way it did, there could easily have been an accident. THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS ISSUE !!!!!!!

- Homer, AK, USA

The car has low miles for the year 42K. The transmission has always been erratic, hard shifting, holding gears for too long. A new problem that is happening, in the morning car clunks extremely hard into second gear. I went to accelerate onto a busy road and the transmission banged so hard it startled us and lost power. There's a safety concern with this because it lost all power and we were almost hit by an approching car. After doing searches on the internet, I found this is a common problem with a lot of Ford Taurus model. The Ford company is apparently aware of this problem in their transmissions and won't do anything about it. I purchased the car with 23K miles on it. As of today, we are concerned about our safety in traffic.

- Largo, FL, USA

The contact owns a 2009 Ford Taurus. The contact stated that while reversing out of residential garage, he attempted to shift into drive but the vehicle suddenly accelerated and crashed into a parked vehicle. The vehicle was taken to the dealer, who diagnosed that the PCM was not programmed correctly. As a result, the PCM needed to be reset. The manufacturer was not made aware of the failure. The vehicle was not repaired. The failure and current mileage was 39,000.

- St Louis , MO, USA