Also known as: cft30, cft23, cft-30, zf batavia, batavia cvt
ZF's CFT chain CVTs, built by its Batavia joint venture — in the Ford Freestyle, Five Hundred and Montego, and the Mini before them.
⚑ These have a poor reputation and it is largely earned. The CFT30 in the big American Fords is the unit most reports concern, and it failed often enough that many cars were converted to a conventional automatic. A high-mileage survivor is rare rather than reassuring.
Batavia closed in 2004, which is the practical problem: the gearbox outlived the company that made it, so parts and rebuild expertise both depend on specialists rather than on a supply chain.
Fluid is the one thing an owner controls and the specification is particular — but on this family a correct fluid history improves the odds rather than settling them.
A reader diagnosing one should establish early whether repair is economic, because on these cars it very often is not, and that is an unusual thing to have to say about a gearbox.
Cars fitted with this gearbox
1 generation. Only where a source names the model and the generation together — a gearbox is documented as a product far more often than as a fitment, so this list is deliberately shorter than the truth.
Mercury
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.
What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
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