Faults:

Lots. Friday afternoon job. Owned from new it has had 1 new cat, 2 new exhausts after one year, 3 new power steering pumps, 4 new brake discs, 5 new idle speed control motors.

General Comments:

Nice car to drive. Optional power steering is bliss. Dealers have been good on the whole with most work done under warranty. Best comment so far was "Your brake pads are fine but your discs have worn out", apparently Ford used too hard a brake pad compound on some cars.

Car was running badly on and off for 18 months, cutting out and over-revving. After 3 attempts (no fault found) eventually diagnosed the idle speed motor. so if they can't find this annoying fault on your car try this.

Faults:

Lots to watch out for - but mainly things wearing out. Rust can appear earlier than you'd like on the older cars. Things tend to go wrong around 60,000 miles. These include: shocks (replace), clutch (replace), cambelt should really be replaced at 60,000 miles (some say more often is even better, like every 30,000 miles).

Front tyre wear is heavy, original lower front suspension wishbone bushes have a design fault that means they work out of position - replace the whole lower arm and get new ball joints at the same time - I've seen a Fiesta ('90 H)with collapsed front suspension on one side due to the ball joint not being replaced! Nearly everything that has gone wrong with mine has been due to things wearing out rather than anything failing suddenly.

General Comments:

A bit thirsty - about 30-32 m.p.g. normally. Bit slow off the mark unless you feed it about 3500rpm - not the best for the clutch. Shifts from about 15 mph and onwards though. Mid-range grunt brilliant for a small car. Best handling Fiesta ever apart, perhaps, from the latest 1.4Si, which feels much slower.

Only wish Ford had seen fit to give it 100BHP - a sub 10sec 0-60 time would have been nice.....

Faults:

Nothing at all mechanical, it sails through it's MOT. The CD player was a bit dodgy though, at least it was under warranty, kept skipping and took ages to fix as dealer forgot to do the work. I gave up on getting the fade to work correctly, it's fine left alone though at L=R, F=B.

General Comments:

Uses a bit too much petrol but isn't too bad, the colour coded body bumpers get alot of stone marks on country roads, the sports seats are really comfy. It is my first car so the insurance is high, probably not ideal at £800 but I've found it is much easier to drive than the Nissan Micra I learnt in. It has a drivers air bag, power steering and ABS. It's a great car I don't ever want to sell it.