DailyTech: Test Drive: 2012 Ford Focus Looks, Drives Great, But Sync Gen 2 Disappoints

Entune works better by going with Engaget's handon.

 

Meh, Sync is a PITA but I wouldn't trade my USB port and 16gb of music on a stick for the world.

I saw a new Focus today and they are very nice looking. I wish I could've parked my Fiesta next to it but I couldn't. They look like big and little brother.

 

I had a quick sit in a 2012 Ford Focus hatchback today. I guess it was an SE model, it had the 2.0L engine.

Of course, I tried to get comfortable in the driver's seat. It scoots back pretty far and lowers a lot. The steering wheel seems mounted in an odd place after pulling it down and out as I always do. I had to raise up seat a little bit and scoot forward a notch to make it more reasonable, but it wasn't great to me.

The leather wrap on the steering was of cheesy material, far from a genuine leather.

The fabric on the seats was very polyester looking, all over. My Accord seats have nice fabric. The focus fabric was quite artificial feeling.

If you slide the driver's seat fully back, the rear seat legroom is just about gone.

The cargo area is pretty much a spittin' image of a Mazda3 hatchback. Definitely less cargo room than 3rd gen Prius. In fact, this car must have the same chassis as the Mazda3 hatch, and the engine must be similar to the Mazda3 2.0L, I'll bet, not sure though.

EPA was 27/37/ 31 avg. for this car.

I guess it's an alright compact car. As a tall guy, I'll stick with my Accord though, I like it.

 

Interesting inside info about what happened with My Touch. Apparently it was outsourced to BSQUARE software, who screwed up. How many times have we seen this before ? Nissan Leaf rollout has been marred by the really bad software an outsource company wrote., for eg.

edit : Some more interesting info here for anyone interested.

Apparently, My Touch is running on old Windows Automotive 4. They use Flash (really !) - which is too bloated for an embedded system. Suggestion is to move to Windows Automotive 7 and silverlight to get things in order.

 

The question is how did it get past the testing and out to production? They could have delayed it and continue to use the first version.