9th Jul 2014, 19:05

I would never use the word 'great' to describe any Ford Focus; decent is more appropriate (yet still very kind) IMO.

11th Jul 2014, 20:13

Never pay any attention to publications such as Consumer Reports. I have found their ratings totally meaningless.

First off, they are horribly biased against all American manufacturers.

Secondly their "problems" often aren't problems at all. I have no qualms at all about buying cars they rate "Much worse than average" in reliability. Our current twelve year old American car has over 130,000 miles on it with a total of $77 in repairs. CR lists it as "Much worse than average". A previous car of ours was also rated "Much worse than average". It only lasted a measly 325,000 miles before starting to have problems. Ratings services are incredibly unreliable.

18th Jul 2014, 14:44

Actually I did drive it, these problems showed up down the road. Do you actually think I would buy a vehicle without driving it first?

22nd Jul 2014, 01:45

Amazingly a lot of people DO buy cars without a test drive. One of my good friends just goes into a dealership, and negotiates a price and buys the car without even seeing it first. I can't imagine doing that, but a lot of younger techno-geek types know or care absolutely nothing about cars, and if they know the car has a lot of electronic gadgets, they could care less about any other aspect of the car. My friend didn't even know if his last car was front or rear drive, or if it had a 4 or 6.

27th Mar 2015, 01:23

I purchased a 2012 Focus Titanium brand new and owned it for about 14-months. The jerky dual clutch automated manual in that car was unpredictable and downright scary. You never knew if the car was going to go when you put your foot on the gas. Sometimes it would sit there and slowly take off, other times it would sit there for a few seconds and then take off like a bat out of h*ll. Pulling out into traffic was a nightmare.

The MyFord Touch system was awesome... when it worked, but it too was unpredictable and quite buggy. It would crash about every two to three weeks and suffered from graphic corruption and other anomalies. Voice recognition worked pretty well for MP3s, changing the radio station and setting the climate control, and that's the one aspect of it that I miss most. It did not work well with Sync services, which is a dial up service through your cell phone. Often the system couldn't understand me through voice commands, and traffic reporting was incorrect about 50% of the time. It wasn't even worth the free two year subscription.

I read about a lot of issues others were having on the Focus forums, many a lot worse than mine, and the lack of support from Ford in resolving those issues, so I traded in the car before it really fell apart and I was stuck with it. I took a loss, which wasn't as bad as it could have been, since I was able to purchase through the employee purchase plan. The 2012 Subaru Impreza Sport I replaced it with has been a stellar vehicle, and I've put 25,000 miles on it with no issues whatsoever, and it gets great mileage for an AWD. Plus visibility is excellent and the car is quite roomy and comfortable inside.

It's a shame really, I think the Focus is one of the nicest looking compacts on the road, with the potential to dethrone competitors like Honda and Toyota. It's too bad it was so poorly engineered and supported by the manufacturer. I plan on sticking with Subaru for the foreseeable future.

2nd Oct 2015, 15:27

Consumer Reports is for the birds. I used to subscribe, but I found them to be wrong most of the time.

2nd Oct 2015, 22:41

According to carcomplaints.com, it looks like Ford finally got the bugs out of that transmission in 2015. Complaints are very low now for the 2015 model, which is great news for new car shoppers. But used car shoppers might avoid the 2012-2014 models with that transmission.