Family of Georgia woman killed in Fiesta crash sues Ford over DPS6 transmission problems
Lt. Austin Cody Smith had just finished the night shift at the City of College Park Police Department in Georgia when he was driving home around 6:25 a.m. and noticed traffic on Interstate 85 merging in a way that made no sense to him, according to court records obtained by the Detroit Free Press.
The uniformed officer spotted a 2018 Ford Fiesta stopped in the far left lane, the passing lane. He pulled his Ram 1500 personal pickup truck to the side of the road and yelled for the two occupants to exit the compact car as quickly as possible on that Friday morning, April 26, 2019.
"When I realized what was happening — when I realized it was a car in the lane, I was like, 'I need to try to help them,'" Smith said in a deposition taken March 16, 2022. "It was dark, and the car was sitting there. ... A disabled vehicle in the middle of the highway is a dangerous situation."
The driver quickly exited. Her sister did not get out in time. And Smith watched as a 2016 Chevy Impala slammed into the back of the Fiesta at an estimated 85 mph, sending it into the concrete median.
Smith leaned into the vehicle as Jyotika Ladd, 63, lay motionless. She would never return to her home in Duluth, Georgia. The crash occurred near Newnan, Georgia, about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta.
The Fiesta driver testified that while she was driving, the vehicle started to pull to the left and shut down on its own, coming to a rest in the spot where it was eventually struck, according to court documents filed Feb. 1, 2023, with the State Court of Clayton County.
"That's something she cannot control, if the car truly had a mechanical malfunction and she could no longer operate it, versus her actually stopping it," Smith said in his deposition.
The claim: The Fiesta malfunctioned in traffic and lost power, causing it to come to a stop.
Reports of Ford Fiestas and Focuses losing power because of allegedly defective transmissions number in the thousands and have spurred massive litigation. The lawsuit over Ladd's death, seeking to directly link the defect to a fatality, is unique. The defect was the subject of a wide-ranging Detroit Free Press investigation that began in 2019 and continues to this day involving millions of bestselling vehicles.
Transmission sparks a flood of litigation
Owners of the 2017-19 Ford Fiesta and 2017-18 Ford Focus filed a lawsuit in 2022 against Ford, alleging the vehicles have the same unfixable transmission defects as earlier models that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in class-action settlement payments.
The owners of the vehicles claim Ford withheld important information when marketing its Dual PowerShift 6-speed (DPS6) transmission as a fuel-efficient alternative to a traditional manual or automatic transmission — intended to provide the convenience of an automatic and fuel efficiency of a manually shifted vehicle.
The vehicles are "plagued by numerous problems and safety concerns … transmission slips, bucking, kicking, jerking, harsh engagement, premature internal wear, sudden acceleration, delay in downshifts, delayed acceleration, difficulty stopping the vehicle, and eventually catastrophic transmission failure," said the lawsuit pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
More: Ford pays $49K to couple for 2014 Fiesta, settles defective transmission cases
The facts presented in Ladd v. Ford sound eerily familiar.
While traveling south on I-85, the driver of the vehicle, Heena Kampani, said that she experienced what she perceived to be shaking and stalling of the Ford Fiesta, according to the lawsuit.
"In response to the shaking sensation," Kampani pulled the Ford Fiesta onto the lefthand shoulder, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit alleges that the car's design was "such that it caused the drive axle to come out of its housing while the vehicle was going down the road and/or due to defects in the transmission," the lawsuit says. "The vehicle lost power."
The microbiologist with a giving heart
In the Georgia case, the car came to a stop partially on the shoulder while still partially protruding into the far left-hand lane, the lawsuit says. At the time, Ladd had removed her seat belt "so she could crawl over the gearshift and exit ... through the driver-side front door."
The lawsuit claims she suffered "fright, shock, mental distress and severe physical injury, resulting in herdeath."
Jyotika Ladd, who moved to the U.S. from India after attending medical school, never became the heart surgeon for which she trained. She fell in love, married and began a small, close-knit family. She spent time volunteering in Atlanta. Her trips to the grocery store routinely included buying boxes of food and fruit to give to people on the street, her daughter told the Free Press earlier this month.
"She's a very authentic, bright, warm person who just wanted to connect with people, so she would always come up to a stranger and ask about them," said Radhi Ladd, 32, a product designer from Denver. "She worked as a microbiologist, and she would make breakfast and lunch and dinner for us before she left."
She and her widower Tracy Alan Ladd, a typesetter who did book layout and design, were married three decades.
"We were pretty simple folk growing up and throughout our whole lives. We didn’t have a whole lot of money," Radhi Ladd said. "One thing she and my dad always prioritized was making sure we would get a chance to travel and just to see what the world was like out there. We went to India for a year when I was 6. You can almost imagine this small family backpacking through India."
So much about life has dimmed since the sudden death of her mother, Radhi Ladd said. "It’s really hard to find the right words. She was the matriarch, the glue that kept everyone together. My dad, me, my brother all relied on her. ... I got married last summer without her there. That was probably the hardest thing ever. Most people expect to lose a parent in their lifetime, but I think losing a parent in such a traumatic way is like something I would never wish upon anyone. That shouldn’t have happened."
The family is seeking closure and hoping to hold Ford accountable, Ladd said.
"My mom should still be here," she said. "And I don’t want this to happen to anybody else. It just left a huge hole we can never really fill. We’re all just trying our best, but she left really big shoes to fill. At her funeral, it was the saddest day ever. It was amazing to see how many people showed up, said amazing things, people I didn’t even know about. ... I wish that she was able to live the life she wanted to after me and my brother grew up and be happy with my dad. They never really got to do that."
Waiting for documents
Ben Baker, who has been meeting with Ford lawyers for months, is waiting for documents cited in the national award-winning "Out of Gear" series from the Free Press. The newspaper investigation, based on internal corporate documents and confidential interviews, was cited in the lawsuit. It described again and again how engineers and Ford leaders were aware of problems in the vehicles, but the company continued to market cars with the flawed transmissions.
"Before Jyotika Ladd’s accident on April 26, 2019, Ford had actual knowledge that the drive axle and/or transmission was defective, could decouple, and that decoupling would result in power loss," the lawsuit says. "Ford knew of the dangers of power loss on an active roadway, but despite this knowledge of the danger, Ford consciously and deliberately kept this information without providing it to the owners, operators and users of their vehicle."
Baker, a product liability lawyer based in Montgomery, Alabama, with the Beasley Allen Law Firm, expects negotiations with Ford to continue for another month or two. He said he knows the company has documents that prove his case and he's waiting for them to be produced by the Dearborn automaker.
The case has been working its way through the pretrial discovery process, during which parties have an opportunity to take sworn testimony from witnesses and request documents from each other that may support any of the claims or defenses in the case.
Baker told the Free Press he believes part of the problem is that federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are overworked and understaffed.
"They don’t have the ability to address the volume of complaints that come in," Baker said. "And so, when that happens, when you have a very large issue like this has become, there’s no way for consumers to find it and become aware of it. Most automakers like Ford are not going to go out and advertise a problem with a product like they would trying to sell the product. I believe there probably are claims that are not connected to the (Ford Focus, Fiesta transmission) defect simply because there is not enough information out there for people to be looking or people to be aware."
He suspects other fatalities could be associated with the transmissions.
"Ford was aware or should have been aware of the dangerous and defective design of this vehicle," the lawsuit says.
More: Ford Focus, Fiesta cars sit in shop for months, owners ‘ghosted’ by automaker
Meanwhile, during a deposition, lawyers for Ford pointed to the speed of the vehicle that hit the Fiesta and questioned Smith repeatedly about whether he provided CPR and the extent of his lifesaving attempts.
Ford said it doesn't believe the loss of power is tied to a Ford Fiesta defect. The company maintains that glitches were addressed with new computer chips in the 2018 Fiesta.
"Ford extended the warranty on vehicles at risk for a computer chip crack in the Transmission Control Module back in (calendar years) 2014-15, and Ford also updated the chip design for production vehicles by (calendar year) 2015," Ford spokesman Ian Thibodeau told the Free Press. "The vehicle you have inquired about is a model year 2018 and had the updated chip design."
More than 2 million Ford customers, who claimed their 2012-16 Focus and 2011-16 Fiesta compact cars were built with defective transmissions, prevailed in a class action filed in 2012 and resolved in 2020.
Problems with defective Focus and Fiesta vehicles have increased with age.
The Free Press noted that the 2012-16 Focus and 2011-16 Fiesta equipped with the DPS6 were the subject of 18 recalls for a range of defects, but none for transmission repair. Ford did extend the warranty after publication of the investigation, but that extension did not cover the 2018 Fiesta. Dealers have been overwhelmed as frustrated customers continue to wait for repairs.
More: Ford knew Focus, Fiesta models had flawed transmission, sold them anyway
More: 2017-19 Ford Fiesta, Focus owners allege DPS6 transmission defect never fixed, sue
Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ford DPS6 transmission issues: Family sues over Fiesta death
