Ford Focus 2011-2016 Common Car Key Problems

If you have a Ford Focus 2011-2016, read on. Are you looking for a hard wearing, high-quality Car key? This isn’t the news you want, but here goes.
Unfortunately, these new Ford car keys now join the rest of the bunch, sat in the corner with the bad boys. They have trouble designed into them, and this article explains why.

There are the two main problems.

Ford Focus 2011-2016 car key problem one

The spring mechanism isn’t up to it. We’re seeing 2-3 year-old keys that no longer spring out. Likewise, we’re also seeing blades that won’t stay retracted when folded away.

When you consider that many cars are on a three-year lease, it means that annoying and frustrating problem will be hitting the second-hand Car showroom sometime soon.

Ford Focus 2011-2016 car key Problem Two

Ford have finally gone with the crowd and changed from the tried and tested, carbon sealed transponder chip.

The older type of chip can be driven over, dropped, and submerged in water and it keeps working.
They have left this fool proof design and moved over to the French system that integrates the chip into a circuit board.

Unfortunately, this less than rugged design is susceptible to damage. This can happen should a butterfly, on the other side of the world, flap its wings. Other causes are keys being dropped, thrown, and getting wet. As well as this, just using it as a car key won’t help.

This change, from a strong hardy chip, to a delicate circuit board is very disappointing. Ford car keys have been excellent quality and the very last manufacturer to convert. We used to give their keys a lifetime warranty, we can’t with this key.

What can be done about this problem?

The good news is two-fold.

Firstly, the keys are reasonably priced. Expect to pay around £150 for a remote key, cut and coded from an independent. The dealers are charging around £200 we understand.

Secondly, there is now a good fix for the broken flip problem.
A repair case is now available and once everything has been swapped over, the cases we’ve seen are good quality.

Watch our video below to see how we fix these.

The only issue is swapping the blade from your old key into the new one. The blade tang (the bit that gets gripped by the key) is sometimes a different shape to in the new case and the old blade won’t fit, or be held securely.
If this happens, you’ll need to get the blade cut.

The good news about this model is that they still use a non-rechargeable CR2032 battery. This is good because it can be easily changed.

Watch our video on how to change the key battery

On the Transit and custom models, these have gone over to rechargeable batteries, which is a backwards step in our opinion.

Read our article on problems with rechargeable batteries here.

Overall, a disappointment. Ford have always produced high quality keys, however this is a departure from an excellent track record.
Ford keys were the last to hold our lifetime warranty, but on this model, it’s no longer available.

We hope this helps!