Ford Focus Hatchback ST-Line 1.0 Ford EcoBoost 125PS 5d Owner Review

I see that cars these days are like phones, trying to get your attention whenever they can with various notifications. My old 2009 car would either go or not go; the Focus loves to provide messages about various things such as which seatbelts are on, a warning about poor visibility on some front camera I don’t know about, and a crash-collision warning that tends to come on on a daily basis as I drive along a bendy road with pedestrians or essentially drive straight towards incoming cars getting roung traffic calming schemes.

I’m sure this sort of thing is normal for cars these days, but it was a bit of a surprise and adds a distraction while driving.

The radio is pretty good and DAB comes on quickly, unlike a typical portable DAB radio you might have in the kitchen. Changing stations – even preset ones – is very difficult whilst driving.
The clock seems to frequently get an hour out, regardless of whether I set it to automatically update or not.

Nice heated front windscreen, heating generally good (in my old Mazda, the air missed most of the windscreen!). The flat buttons aren’t particularly easy to feel for whilst driving, requiring to look down to see what you're going to press. Depending on how you turn the heating on, air conditioning switches itself on whether you want it or not.

The wing mirrors are weirdly small. I find reversing a lot more difficult than my old car because the rear window is inset quite a way from the back of the car, so it’s hard to know how far back to reverse. Definitely worth getting some parking sensors.

Easy to fill up the screenwash, but the cap isn’t attached (or isn’t in mine at least) – my first cap fell somewhere into the depths of the engine and I had to get a new cap from eBay.

The actual driving? Pretty nice, not enthralling but pleasant. I was surprised at how diesel-like the petrol engine sounds. I test drove a Puma at the same time as this car and the Puma was nicer to drive (perhaps because the smaller size made it better on small roads and probably also because it had a higher bhp), but I wanted the practicality that the larger Focus gives.