Focus. Diesel. Now.

**niky** · July 31st, 2007 05:55 PM

The Ford Focus has always been an exceptional car, but a heavy body and a gasoline engine mated to an ancient four-speed automatic transmission have handicapped it immensely on the local market. The new Honda Civic has it beaten black and blue in terms of outright speed and economy, and has the lion's share of the market.

Well, place your bets for Car Of The Year 2007, people... Ford's finally got a contender...

pic courtesy of rangerXLT / rav_5 /ravien of Ford Club Philippines

pic courtesy of stone911 of Ford Club Philippines

Quick low-down:
136 hp at 4000 rpm
340 Nm of torque at 2000 rpm (that's more than the 1.7 million peso Subaru WRX puts out)
13.5 km/l - city fuel economy
20.5 km/l - highway fuel economy (media teams got 20 km/l crawling around Subic's restricted speed zone, with its zillions of stop signs).

Six speed gearbox with a sweeeeet shifter (Euro-style) with a very positive and smooth action, heavy duty clutch (amazingly strong... no burnt clutch smell despite the numerous drag launches, and absolutely no slippage on drop-clutch launches) with a light feel, and still the best sound insulation, ride, handling and brakes in the compact class.

Oh, and there's a 1.8 liter gasoline hatchback coming out, too. ;)

Price: confirmed at 1.089 million pesos. Whew!

Head on over to http://forum.fordclubph.com for more of the buzz. Man, the guys are excited.

**alwayz_yummy** · July 31st, 2007 06:04 PM

yehey!!!! kailan testdrive pasabit naman please...

una ko nakita ata yan sa manila auto show.. then 1st ko nadinig ang makina sa "hotwire" sa silvercity..

gusto ko maramdaman ang takbo!

may dvd parin ba?

**Auto_Xer** · July 31st, 2007 06:08 PM

[QUOTE=niky;866090]The Ford Focus has always been an exceptional car, but a heavy body and a gasoline engine mated to an ancient four-speed automatic transmission have handicapped it immensely on the local market. The new Honda Civic has it beaten black and blue in terms of outright speed and economy, and has the lion's share of the market.

Well, place your bets for Car Of The Year 2007, people... Ford's finally got a contender...

pic courtesy of rangerXLT / rav_5 /ravien of Ford Club Philippines

Cooking it into the corner....

**mazdamazda** · July 31st, 2007 06:22 PM

Wow... they are launching the Ford Focus Diesel! Man - I would've loved to drag launch one. :innocent:

**niky** · July 31st, 2007 06:24 PM

Hahaha... actually, that's a TRS instructor, doing it on purpose. They destroyed a whole bunch of tires last weekend...

Man, it was a blast. There will definitely be a few more test-drives, and JP Tuason is talking about setting up some of these babies for track work.

The additional down-low torque makes a joke out of autocross work. They had another car (2.0, 5 speed MT, gasoline, 155 hp... wanna guess what it was?

) do the autocross, and despite the considerably better acceleration out-of-the-hole of the "enemy" car, it couldn't match the cornering speed and corner-exit speed of the diesel... worth a difference of 1.2 or 1.5 seconds on a 43-45 second autocross course.