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I now have about 2700 miles flat towed on my Focus and have not experienced any problems at all. I believe this car is towable four down, but you must follow Fords direction to doing this to the letter. My guess is that those who have experienced transmission failure have not TOTALLY disconnected the battery. I disconnect the positive side instead of the negative because the negative post is just not easily accessible. I don't know that others failures are due to a partially connected battery, but that is my suspicion. One can easily be misled into thinking that the wire that leads from the negative battery terminal connection to the the bolt on the frame is the ground, and it is, but it is not the only ground... there are other grounds still attached to the negative battery terminal connector. That is the reason I chose to disconnect the positive terminal. It is more accessible and because of it's accessibility it becomes visually obvious that the battery is truly disconnected. l do know that so far, doing it the way I chose has worked for me. I do worry that I could be in same boat as others at some point. The 2012 Focus is a great handling and riding small car that also gets very good gas mileage, about 31.7 MPG combined right now. It is effortless to tow. The door lock issue is an annoyance that you have to make note off and lock the doors BEFORE disconnecting the battery. As to a 2013 Focus, I believe it is the same as the 2012. From the 2013 manual: Vehicles with an Automatic Transmission but No Push Button Start System Note: There must be battery power to properly move the transmission’s internal components to position N in Step 3. In addition, moving the gearshift to position N without first turning the ignition to the on (II) position limits the towing capability to 35 mph (56 km/h) and 50 miles (80 kilometers). 1. Release the parking brake. 2. Turn the ignition to the on (II) position. 3. Press the brake pedal, then move the gearshift to position N. 4. Wait for TRANSMISSION READY to appear in the multi-function display, then turn the ignition to the off (0) position and release the brake pedal. 5. Disconnect the negative (black) cable from the battery. (emphasis is mine) (The anti-theft system does not function until the battery cable is reconnected.) See Changing the vehicle battery in the Maintenance chapter when disconnecting and reconnecting the battery cable. • The maximum towing speed is 70 mph (113 km/h). • There is no limitation on towing distance. When done towing, start the engine within 15 minutes of reconnecting the battery cable. When reconnecting that cable, tighten it until it is snug against the terminal. Be careful not to over-tighten. It is essentially identical to the 2012 manual.

I have now towed my Focus about 1500 miles with no issues to report from a towing perspective. Compared to towing my Sport Trac, it is a much lighter load to tow... almost like nothing is there. The only issues from a non towing perspective that I ran into was a light wiring mistake I made... I mis-wired the lights socket that connects the Focus to my motorhome, and the issue about the door locks which the poster Pocono1 explained. If you want to have all doors locked while you are towing (and/or parked), you MUST lock the doors with the on dash lock switch or the key fob BEFORE you disconnect the battery. The door locking mechanism is electronic only on this car (annoying).... something that also caught me by surprise the first time and had me reconnecting the battery. It requires just a minor adjustment in the sequence and procedures I use when preparing for towing. One final thing about disconnecting the battery. When you disconnect the battery, you will lose all the trip mileage information you may have... the average and trip mileage info will reset to zero. This of course does not affect the total miles. One other question that I see came up is about the key and steering column lock. My experience with that is that on this vehicle, the column does not lock at any time. However with the transmission in neutral and the battery connected you cannot remove the key from the ignition as you cannot turn the key to the off position. BUT, once you remove the power from the system, you can turn the key to off and remove the key. I have no idea why some folks are having trouble while towing their new Focus, but my only guess is that their cars may not have all power removed while towing... that the battery is not totally disconnected and that there is no power is being applied through the RV lights connection to the Focus electrical system. I will be heading home shortly and will put another 1500 miles or so towing my Focus and if there is anything new to report I will report it here. Oh and by the way, my combined mileage (city / highway with probably 80% highway miles) on my Focus is about 32.2 MPG. which looks to be about average for this car according to the site fuelly.com.

jlef123-- Installation was not too bad... couple of things in the installation instructions missing that I had to figure out. My biggest problem was the hole that you have to drill in the cap of the frame tube. That metal is ridiculously hard... I went through 5 hole saws... the metal cutting type, before I gave up and used a Sawzall... went through 5 blades with that but got the hole made. That hole has to be made in order to attach the baseplate bolts to the frame of the car. As soon as I have towed a few miles I will report back but I don't expect any problems. Follow Ford's procedures and recommendations and I think all will be ok... at the very least you should be covered if there is a failure. That's the way I look at it. I bought the Focus specifically because Ford states in their car manual that it can be towed four down and because of the great milage the car gets... Highest I have gotten is 47 MPG lowest about 31 MPG. Huge improvement from my Explorer Sport Trac which I like a lot and tow but only gets around 16 to 17 MPG.

I don't know this to be a fact, but I don't think towing will register miles because either you have installed the battery disconnect or disconnected battery or the key is off... in either case I can't see how it could register miles. I have not towed mine yet so I cannot answer from personal experience... soon I will be able too let you know though... will be heading south!

As promised, the following are some pictures of Focus baseplate and wiring project I previously described. You can click on picture for a larger view. First the finished front. With the removable pins, I think it ends up looking fairly clean: Here you can see how I ran the wire to the rubber grommet to go into the passenger compartment: In the following picture I attempt to show the rubber grommet. You can almost see it behind the air conditioning tubing. Actually getting to it is not nearly as bad as it looks in this picture... I just couldn't get camera in the right location: The next picture shows the door trim that I removed to run the wire to the back: And the same trim pulled up. You can see the wires in the space between the metal and the plastic trim: This is a shot of the diodes. I mounted them on a small board just to hold things together: The diodes I used: The battery cover still fits with the battery disconnect switch installed: And the cover removed showing the disconnect. The way the 'switch' works is that when you unscrew the green knob, it breaks the contact between two pieces of metal. I do not want to travel with a loose knob so I have two rubber flat washers that I place between the two pieces of metal... Two because I am more comfortable with more insulating thickness. One would probably do the job. I store the rubber washers on the ground post. And finally, a picture of the dash indicator of the transmission being set for towing. Hopefully, this will help make my previous post a little more clear. Alex

Sorry that I failed to provide that VERY significant detail! Yes, my Focus is an automatic model. I will take some pictures of my setup and post later. Alex

I have some things to report about my 2012 Focus baseplate installation and wiring. My baseplate is Blue Ox. My car is a 5 door hatchback. Baseplate installation was fairly straight forward with a couple of problems. The current baseplate installation instructions for the Blue Ox basplate are incomplete as there is a step involving the removal of the front fascia that is not in listed. One other thing I ran into in the installation is the hardness of the metal where I was supposed to drill 1.25" holes. I have never worked with metal this hard and ultimately had to cut the opening with a sawzall. The metal ate up metal cutting hole saws. Tail light wiring was also straight forward. I ran the 4 conductor wire from the connector mount on the baseplate, to the right side then along the side of the battery case to the back and I wire tied it to some tabs that hang across the back near the firewall. In order to get the wires to the back of the car, you have to get it into the cabin and the easiest way I found is to go in the rubber grommet that lets wires into the engine compartment from the cabin. Using a a straightened coat hanger, I securely taped the wire end to one end of the coat hanger. I used some lubricant on the coat hanger and on the rubber and the wire to make feeding the wire easier. On the cabin side, it is easier to to retrieve and pull the coat hanger if the glove box is removed. First you remove the felt cover that is in the top of the foot space by removing two black round plastic clips... the just pull off. Remove the felt cover and set aside. The glove box is held by 5 torx screws: 2 underneath and in the back of the glove box... they are accessed in the space where the felt cover was removed, 2 are at the top of glove box inside after the glove box door is opened and the 5th, is on the right side accessible after the side cover is removed. The glove box can be now removed. Now you have a nice open space that allows much easier access to the rubber grommet. I pushed the coat hanger through. I then went to the cabin side and pulled the wire through. I ran the wire to the right side. Running it to the back is quite easy. Just pull rubber door trim up and slide the wire into space between the plastic trim and metal body frame material. At the center pillar area you can use the coat hanger again to push wire through and again at the rear felt panel. The rubber trim can be pushed back on. I chose to wire the tail lights using diodes. You can get the ones available from Roadmaster or others. I used some inexpensive full wave bridge type of enough capacity and very inexpensive... buck a piece. The vehicle wire colors used on both sides are purple / green, 2 per side. I marked one of the wires so as not to mix them up when I cut them for the diodes. One wire drives the brake light and the other drives the running light. It is a tight job as there is not a lot of extra wire to work with. Not sure why they are both purple/ green as they are not both the same. For the battery disconnect I decided to use plus side of the battery instead of the negative as it is MUCH easier to access. I am lucky to have a very good dealer to work with and I discussed this with him and he could not think there should be any issue in doing this. He also suggested that I bring the car in for new updated programming of the computer that controls the transmission and affects recreational towing. Part of the new programing also results in a dash indication when the the transmission is in the proper mode. Indeed the the panel between the dash gauges now indicates "Transmission Ready" when properly set. I was able to look at the electrical wiring book for the Focus which shows that power is still applied to one of the modules if you pull the negative from the frame. This may mean that there is a possibility that the transmission could shift out of its towing mode. I wish Ford provided more clarity on this. Battery drain is not the reason that Ford is saying to remove the negative terminal from the battery. Some of the suggestions that have been made regarding running a charge line from the RV would address a battery drain issue, but that is not an issue with this car. Someone else talked about installing a Battery Brain. This also leaves power applied to the car. In my view, anything that leaves power on to the vehicle may be asking for trouble. The procedure Ford defines says to turn the ignition key to off. Turning the key to off on this car does not lock the steering column. Having the key off means that anything that has significant battery drain is turned off. I want to make sure that all power is disconnected from the battery. I want to take no chances. Again it would be nice to have a more detailed explanation from Ford. I hope this information might be helpful for anyone wanting to tow a 2012 Focus four down.

I am getting ready to install my Blue Ox Baseplate on my 2012 Focus SEL and set it up for towing. Here is what I have learned. As others have discovered, Ford's procedure, specifically the battery disconnect portion, is not something that anybody will do regularly (I certainly will not) as, from what I can tell, it involves removing the battery from its tray in order to access the negative terminal. Here is a picture that shows, sort of, the location of the negative battery post. It also shows the ground cable some have discussed. https://www.dropbox....%2009.43.17.jpg I have been searching for an accurate answer about the fact that 3 wires stay connected if you only pull off the frame mounted portion of the cable. At this point I will digress a little to a minor rant. I like my Focus a lot. It is a very nice riding small car and is a heck of a lot of fun to drive. The Sync system... not so hot. Having said that, my experience with Ford customer service has been attrocious, one of the worst customer service experiences I have had. I have tried to get a couple of simple (for them, I would think) answers from Ford and they are not interested in getting the customer a good answer. They gave me erroneous garbage, unrelated and nonsense answers. They try to get you to go talk to a dealer. The dealer did not know the answer. In fact the dealer gave me the wrong answer, something I expected because of the nature of the question. Though he tried to get the answer to my battery question, he did not seem like he was confident in the answer he received from Ford on the issue. In any case, Ford told him that the negative terminal had to be disconnected at the battery. In my experience, Ford's Job One is not currently customer satisfaction. It is like talking to technical support in India. Usually you talk to a pleasant person, but the information you get is useless. Little gets accomplished. As much as I like my Focus, I may never buy another Ford. The frustration in dealing with them has been too high... and this is on two relatively simple issues. When the problems get bigger as they sometimes do, the frustration levels will be that much higher. Recently, a fulltime RVer who blogs regularly blew an engine... His experience with Ford customer service was very similar to mine. End of rant. Ford's standpoint, at least according to my dealer, is that you have to disconnect the battery at the terminal and not at the frame because of the additional wires attached to the ground post. One other piece of information that may be valuable to other 2012 Focus owners that are towing 4 down is that when the dealer made the inquiry to Ford about my towing and the battery questions, they did recommend that I bring my Focus in to get an updated program in one of the computers before I started towing. If I learn anything new when I get this programming done I will post it here. He also said he had some Technical Service info he is going to share with me. Because of the much better location of the positive post, I am going to put a disconnect there instead of the negative side... probably not as 'safe' as disconnecting the negative but I think it will be much easier and accomplish what needs to be accomplished... removing power from the system. I cannot see a reason that this would be any different than disconnecting the negative. If anyone can see a problem doing it this way, your input would be appreciated. I will discuss this with the dealer too. Alex