Quote:
Originally Posted by Drew
I do like the Focus ST, in light of the lack of AWD option. Ford is finally getting up to par on appearances. It looks great. But do you think the Focus will be immune to the kind of problems the Ecoboost Escape had? If I bought a brand new "A" from manufacturer X, and had alot of problems with it, I don't know that I would just go out and buy a brand new "B" from same manufacturer. I got food poisoning from Subway once, and didn't eat there for 5 years...
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Glad you asked. The current Focus platform has been out since mid 2011, and most of the kinks and bugs have been worked out for the 2013 MY. In fact, the girlfriend has a 2013 Focus SE with the Powershift trans (like the SST but not), it operates much better than the 2012 model, they finally fixed the stuttering and roughness issues.
The 2.0L Ecoboost has been on the US market since 2011 and has been proven to be a good engine in most applications, with very few turbo failures due to manufacture defects. I'm not worried about the engine at all, in fact I never had a problem with the Escape's 2.0 Ecoboost either.
The 2013 Escape was a brand new model, so for a first year of a new generation I expected a few bugs, but not as many as I encountered. The brake pedal was sticky at times, the rotors had to be machined at 3,000 miles, the horrible 6F35 transmission was awful to operate and third gear kept giving me issues, the steering alignment could never be fixed, the electric power steering had feedback issues, the fuel economy was horrible, the remote start didn't want to work every time... and a couple other issues that I can't remember at the moment.
Although the Escape is built on the Focus platform, it has it's own power steering system, it's own braking system, doesn't use the same auto trans, and doesn't have the same suspension. Those are all new exclusively for the Escape because of the SUV/CUV nature of the vehicle.
So to answer your question, I feel a lot more confident in the Focus than I did with the Escape. Plus, it's designed to take a beating due to the performance-oriented nature of it, but I don't think I'll be driving it that hard