Used Ford Focus review: 2009

Daryl Eaves bought a 2009 Ford Focus petrol manual as a second car, but is disappointed with its fuel consumption, which averages 11 L/100 km. He says that it's mostly used on short trips and asks if the poor economy warrants further investigation or should he simply lower his expectations.

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Sales of mid-sized cars were beginning to boom when Ford unveiled the LV Focus in 2009; traditional big cars were increasingly on the nose with buyers who were downsizing like never before.

Carmakers like Mazda and VW were leading the charge and forcing others like Ford and Holden to take the demand for smaller cars more seriously.

Ford was focused more on the Falcon and Territory, cars that affected their viability as local manufacturers, more than their smaller models such as the imported Focus and faced a tough task in selling buyers on the merits of their offerings.

The European Focus was a good driving car with great handling and should have received more attention from the market than it did.

It was offered in four-door sedan and five-door hatch body styles. Both were quite roomy for their external dimensions and offered the traditional security of a sedan or the modern practicality of a hatch depending on your preference.

The range included sporty models, but for the purposes of this column and the question asked by our reader we'll confine ourselves to the CL, LX and TDCi models that had the broadest appeal.

Petrol and diesel engine options were offered. The petrol engine was a 2.0-litre four that had all the punch needed in a car of its size; the turbo-diesel was also a 2.0-litre and delivered plenty of performance with the promise of better economy.

There was also a choice of manual and automatic transmissions. They were five-speed units with the petrol engines, but six-speeders with the diesel.

Buyers got plenty of features when they signed up for the LV Focus, with things like air, cruise, power windows and mirrors, four-speaker sound and front fog lights.

Safety was also well covered with ABS braking with electronic brakeforce distribution, traction control, and front and side airbags, and stability control on the diesel model.

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Daryl Eaves bought a used 2009 Focus with the petrol engine and manual transmission for use as a second car on short trips. So far he is disappointed with its fuel consumption, which he says averages 11.0 L/100 km, and he asks if there is something wrong with the car or is it what he should expect.

Being five years or so old, and likely to have done between 80,000 and 130,000 km, you would expect that the car isn't operating as its absolute peak and be in need of a tune-up.

But the most likely answer to our reader's question is that the consumption is probably what he should expect given the short distances it's doing.

Ford claimed the 2.0-litre manual Focus would do 7.1 L/100 km on a combined cycle. That's a test cycle that is a combination of city and highway driving.

At the same time they also published figures for urban (city) driving and highway driving, those being 9.8 L/100 km and 5.4 L/100 km respectively.

With our reader's car doing short trips when a good part of its time is spent warming up the engine, transmission and differential, possibly also in stop-start traffic around the suburbs we would expect it to be getting closer to the 9.8 L/100 km than the average 7.1 L/100 km.

Doing short trips with a partly warmed-up engine is also a recipe for carbon accumulation in the combustion chambers, which can reduce a car's running efficiency and increase the fuel consumption.

To confirm our suspicions we would suggest Daryl takes it on an extended highway run and check the fuel consumption under those driving conditions. If the car is doing what it is supposed to do the consumption should drop to around 5.4 L/100 km.

If it doesn't then it's worth carrying out a tune-up, changing spark plugs, spark plug leads and air filter, cleaning the throttle body and adding some fuel system cleaner to one or two fuel fills.

A good hard run to blow accumulated carbon out of the engine could also reap benefits.

Choosing the diesel engine variant would have given Daryl a more economical car, with claimed fuel consumption of 4.8 L/100 km (hwy), 5.9 L/100 km (avg.) and 7.9 L/100 km (urban), but the TDCi is on average $2000-$3000 more expensive than the petrol models and that would need to be recovered before the potential fuel savings could be realized.