Lose Power Steering problems of the 2014 Ford Escape

While driving down the highway 70mph, I suddenly lost power steering. I struggled to keep the car in my lane as it pulled hard to the right. My dashboard lit up with "steering loss stop safely" message.

My wife's 2014 Escape worked fine in the morning for her to run and do an errand. When she went to start the car it failed to start and I was able to jump it and get it to a local auto zone for a battery replacement. When I was pulling into auto zone I noticed a small catch while turning left and lost power steering for a few seconds. I made note of it mentally but just focused on getting the battery replaced as that seemed to be the underlying issue. Now the battery has been replaced and I go to leave and I have absolutely no power steering with a warning stating "power steering assist fault" service required. I muscled her car home to recheck my work and its all good. A day later after researching the issue I throw a hail mary and disconnect the battery for about a minute and then reconnected it and bingo I have steering. My wife later left for shopping and had zero issues until her attempt to leave. She immediately got the error message and had intermittent power steering on her drive home but was able to make it with the use of brute force. I had the transmission and recall addressed about two to three months ago and this car has been a pain since then with needing a jump in cold weather. Now this and the outlook of a 2,000 repair when it took a dealership 2 months to do a recall and replace the transmission that was magically "fried" I'm hesitant to trust anything Ford says but this a huge safety issue that has documented history and needs to be a recall. Now I need to find out why its in and out and what to do moving forward. #fordservicesucks.

On August 23rd, 2019, I was driving back from a 240 mile round trip and was caught in a severe thunderstorm. As I was pulling inot a parking lot to wait out the storm, my power steering failed. After 10 minutes it came back and I was able to make it home. I took it to a service station the next morning and no error codes showed up. On August 30th after making the same round trip, I again lost my power steering near my home. It failed to come back. I had the car towed to a local shop. They determined it was a failure identical to the active recall in the model year prior to mine and it needed to be towed to the dealership. The dealership confirmed an internal fault in the power steering rack which will need to be replaced. Thankfully the steering failures happened when I was either in the process of parking or already parked.

Without notice, it started my vehicle and received a "steering assist fault" message and lost all power steering. One mechanic said that it was a Ford software update that wasn't compatible with my electronic steering. I took it to Ford dealership and they said the rack and pinion gear was the problem. $2,000 repair.