general problems of the 2009 Ford Taurus

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 !!!!!!!.

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.

Have a small power steering leak that turned out to be a racket pinion issue. I've talked to a few people with the same car and they have also had the same issue. Small leak in the same area that turned out to be the racket pinion needing replaced. You can really see the leak when parked.

While pulling into parking space at very low speed with right foot on brake petal, car accelerated up and lurched forward hitting parked vehicle in front. Had to apply brake harder to get vehicle in park to stop acceleration.