Ford 6F15

Ford's smallest six-speed automatic: a transverse unit built in China from 2014 for the one-litre cars — the Fiesta, the Focus and the EcoSport.

Its stated purpose was to replace the PowerShift. Source A puts it plainly — a six-speed transaxle designed for the 1.0 EcoBoost, brought in to take over from the DPS6, the dry-clutch Getrag that Ford sold under the PowerShift name. That gearbox has its own page here, and its record is the reason this one is worth knowing about at all. Why Ford wanted a replacement is not something any source states, and this page will not guess at it; what the PowerShift actually did to the cars it was fitted to is documented rather than inferred.

The practical consequence is that one model year of one car is not enough to tell you what you have. A Focus of the 2011-2018 generation left the factory with a PowerShift, or with this unit, or — with the larger engine — with the 6F35. The 2012-2022 EcoSport is the same story. The clue is the engine and the build year rather than the badge: this is the one-litre car's gearbox, and it arrived partway through both of those model runs rather than at the start of either. The Fiesta is the tidy case, because there the changeover fell on a generation boundary: the 2008-2017 car has the PowerShift and the 2017 car has this.

It is not part of the GM-Ford joint programme, despite wearing the same 6F prefix. The 6F50, 6F55 and 6F35 are that programme, built at Van Dyke and Sharonville from 2007; the encyclopedia article that documents it names those three and does not mention this unit, and the trade places this one in a Chinese plant from 2014. A shared numbering scheme is not evidence of a shared design — a rule this catalogue already had to apply to General Motors' own 6T range, and the reason there are now three Ford pages here rather than one.

The fluid is the thing most likely to be got wrong, because it changed partway through. Units built before 2018 take Mercon LV; from 2018 they take Mercon ULV, and the two are not interchangeable. That is a specification split inside one gearbox's production run, which is an unusually easy mistake for an owner or an independent shop to make.

What the trade meets, in the order it tends to arrive:

• A delay engaging first gear on early units, resolved by reflashing the control software and in some cases by replacing the valve body. This is the one that shows up as a complaint rather than as damage.
• Fluid that degrades faster than the schedule assumes, presenting as jerking. Source B's own recommendation is roughly 30,000 km against the nominal interval, which is a service book being second-guessed by the people who open these units.
• The differential, described as the weak point and as intolerant of prolonged slippage — so a car repeatedly worked free of snow or a wet verge is being asked for the one thing this unit is least willing to give.

And a caution that belongs on this page precisely because it is not about the gearbox. Two recalls touch these cars in the United States and neither is a transmission fault: an engine oil pump belt that deteriorates, and incompletely installed front halfshafts on 2021-2022 EcoSports. A halfshaft that is not properly in place presents as a car that will not drive, which is the first thing an owner blames on the automatic. Rule it out before anybody opens anything.

On fluid and capacity: Mercon LV before 2018 and Mercon ULV from 2018, around 8.6 litres in total with roughly 4.5 for a partial change, on a nominal interval near 60,000 km that the trade would halve. On torque: source B rates the unit to about 200 Nm, which is consistent with the engines it sits behind; a source that went looking for a published Ford service-level limit covering every application reports that there is not one, and declines to invent it.