2003 Ford Focus st170 from UK and Ireland - Comments

Nothing went wrong with the car at all. If maintained properley, things shouldn't go wrong with the worst of cars.

Cars are like people, if you take care of the body, it will take care of you. As a Ford registered Master Technician, every module update and Octane ratings have been set and I have gone out of my way to set the trackings and learn about what makes this particular engine happy. I'm appalled to hear such bad reviews on this site. Come on Focus owners, give them some TLC and you will be a winner.

If you're a ford technician you should know how shoddy these cars are, as a trained technician myself in the years of workmanship I seen how these cars are built and testing and so on, and would never purchase.

Mine did 115,000 miles on routine services only. Never broke down, failed to start or had anything beyond a couple of blown bulbs go wrong with it. Still drove brilliantly at the end. All the stuff inside still worked. Used half a litre of oil between services, same as it did pretty much from new, sweet as a nut, no rattles inside. Shoddy? Mine wasn't. Much better built than the mk4 Golf GTI 1.8T that it replaced.

Needed more power, but boy did it handle.

I agree with Mastertechs point about looking after the car and it will look after you.

I am on my second Focus, the current one on 76k and both have been very reliable.

Ford have great build quality and reliability!

I agree that the ST170 is a super handling car, but found the reliability and build quality to be very poor. I finally abandoned my 02 car at the dealers after they were unable to fix a string of problems which started to occur as soon as the car was delivered - maybe been a Friday afternoon car (Beware AU02WXO!)