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You could flush the HF35 transmission but why? The instant you release the drain plug a big gush of fluid carrying whatever wear metals are in there will come out. If you look at a teardown of the transmission there's no hydraulic control passages/clutches/fluid filters/etc like a normal automatic. It's more like a manual transmission, just some gears in there and not much else. The electric motors are responsible for changing the gear ratio, the rpm of MG1 changes the effective gearing depending on how fast the car is moving. I would do it at 100k but 150k is probably fine too. The transfer shaft failures mentioned on the forum probably cannot be prevented with more frequent fluid changes. Only way to fix the issue is to catch it before the bearings fail and allow the transfer shaft to wobble in the transmission and grind away at everything else in the transmission. Then you have to rebuild the transmission with the updated parts listed in the TSB. Or a new transmission entirely.

Ugh. My wife's 2014 Ford CMAX just started making this noise and it is getting louder. A call to the dealer told us the power train was out of warranty at 5/60k. And becasue we bought the car used at Carmax it wasn;t covered to 100k like some. So now we are facing a $4000+ repair of the transmission of a car that doesn't even have 100k on the clock. I'm taking it into the local dealer here in Durham to see if I can shame them into calling ford to try to do something for us. So far the climate control has broken too about 3 years ago so the car has no heat in the winter when my wife drives it in electric mode. (she lives very close to work and she plugs it in every night). WE took it to the dealer for that and that was going to cost about $2000 and they would have to replace the whol climate control module. It was out of warranty then. So far this car has been a huge lemon!

I'm glad I found this discussion because now I know I'm not alone. First off, I love the C-Max, it handles and rides very well, with plenty of power.....but this wheel/tire/ road noise is a serious problem. In all the cars I have owned in my 41 years of driving I have never had a wheel bearing problem. I have a 2013 C-Max with 40,000 miles. Late last year with about 25,000 miles noise started coming from front end. Turned out to be a right front wheel bearing which was replaced under warranty. Noise got better. Six months later noise started getting bad in the back.....to the point that conversation in the car was difficult. Brought it in to dealer and both rear wheel bearings were bad, again replaced under warranty. They rotated tires at the same time. Now left front in noisier than anything I have ever heard driving a car. I called back to Dealer and he said the noise is probably from the tires (which may have been damaged as a result of the wheel bearings being bad??) This is a serious quality issue and will give the C-Max a terrible reputation, not to mention the five or six recalls already.

Well, there goes the trade-in vaue of my 2013!!