1999 Ford Focus review from Netherlands

I found the vibrating exhaust very irritating. This was caused by small parts in the exhaust, at least that's how my dealer explained this. It couldn't be repaired, but a good slap with a hammer on the exhaust might help. Tried it, it helped, but the noise came back soon. The exhaust was replaced later without costs.

One time my Focus went dead while driving on the highway with about 130 km/h. No lamps, no engine, nothing. I managed to steer to the highway side safely (brakes still worked, as did the steering wheel). I turned the ignition. Nothing, everything dead, no power, nothing. As I'm into computers I realized a real reset might help. So how to do a soft reset with a car? Maybe removing the keys and inserting them again? Yep. That worked. The car never experienced this problem anymore and a couple of months later (!) I received a recall-letter describing this problem - the computer needed a hard-reset to solve this. My dealer had already done exactly that.

No other problems occurred except for the many stones that seem to like the front of the Focus. I never had a car which got hit so many times.

This car is very quick. I'm a go-cart fanatic and the Focus Trend is quite close to go-carting. You can do almost anything with it. It's definitely fun to drive a Focus. And it's the first car I ever had which did not only just reach the printed maximum speed (185 km/h) but exceeded it quite a lot (210 km/h without any tuning!).