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I lost count of how many recalls there were for my Ford Focus, including one for my transmission software after 4 trips to my dealer to report a problem they wouldn’t fix.

I would strongly recommend avoiding Ford products.

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The thing is, even though I've pretty much always owned a car with a foreign nameplate, I really like most of the domestic cars I've driven. Most Fords look attractive to me, Chevys are getting better lookswise, and most of the time the suspension tuning in domestic cars seems better than I'm used to in Japanese vehicles. I drove a Chevy Sonic once, which is, I believe basically a Korean car, and the sort of car often described as a "shitbox", but I was amazingly planted when going over bumpy pavement at high speed, unlike, say, Hondas that I've driven that feel like they want to skitter off the road.

But there's always been a dealbreaker. Frequently the transmission. I mean, even before it was fully verified that the DCT in the Focus was a disaster, I certainly expected it to have problems and never understood why they would take the risk on a low-end car. People always blame "bean counters" for automotive failures, but it seems (based on my imagination as an outsider) like it's more an unhealthy intersection of cost-cutting and engineers that want to be daring.

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