Ford Focus 2015 News

An all-new ST is also on the way as the successor to the XR5 Turbo, although the full-house RS500 is no chance Down Under as it is a European sellout.  The all-new ST is previewed at this week's Paris Motor Show, almost glowing under lights with its outrageous Tangerine Scream bodywork, although it is not coming to showrooms until 2012.  It is set to take the local place of the XR5 turbo although there is little detail yet from Broadmeadows.  "The thing we're looking at now is another Focus ST, which is the XR5 here in Australia," says says Beth Donovan, vice-president of marketing and sales for Ford Australia. She says Ford Australia has enough supplies of the XR5 for 2011, until the ST takes over as one of the first One Ford global products.  "The XR5 is under-stated, where the RS is overt. I think if we have an opportunity to have vehicles that enhance our brand, then those opportunities expand where we are with One Ford," Donovan says. The basics of the ST are impressive - a new four-cylinder EcoBoost engine with 10 per cent more power and torque but 20 per cent lower emissions - with a new chassis, 19-inch alloy wheels, bigger brakes and a six-speed close-ratio gearbox. The engine replaces the Volvo- designed five-cylinder turbo in the XR5 and comes with 186 kiloWatts. Work on the car is shared between engineers at Team RS in Europe and SVT in the USA, who are upgrading the basic Focus with lowered suspension and a bolder body kit. “The new Focus ST will be our first true global performance says Jost Capito, director of global performance vehicles.  Like the ST and RS models before it, the Focus ST will be the result of painstaking tuning around the curves of the Nürburgring, along high- speed German autobahns, and down classic British B-roads."  

Nicknamed after the great scientists, the pair of ‘Aachen head’ sensor systems – a ball and a vaguely humanoid shape worth about $250,000 each – are key to research in the sound vision lab.  Bolted into their workstations, they’re putting in 16-hour days hunting down the source of undesirable squeaks, rattles and moans in prototype cars, and reporting them back to their minders.When the sound hits the 31 microphones and 12 digital cameras inside the ball, the time lag is able to be measured and Pythagorean theory – basically triangulation – is used to identify where the noise ‘hotspots’.  The pair is not completely office-bound, and often get mounted in cars and taken for drives to keep refining the research on sound identification and suppression.The aim is to eliminate any undesirable noise – whether from road, drivetrain, wind or simply parts of the vehicle that could be further streamlined.  Working in tandem with the `sound vision’ lab is the one devoted to sound quality, where an analytical simulator shows how the car’s noise impacts on the occupants.“A big piece of ‘great to drive’ is how the vehicle sounds,” says lab spokesman Mark Clapper, adding that a lot of work makes for a seemingly small improvement on paper.“Three per cent improvement in quietness is about three year’s progress,” he says.The analytical simulator can mimic the sounds of particular engine ‘types’ – a European turbo, a luxury V6 – and compare them over different road surfaces, or jump from one drivetrain to another to allow the engineers to compare the effect. However, it’s not all about making cars quiet. It’s also about making them noisy in an enjoyable way.  “We combine exhaust and intake system to tune the pipes of the vehicle and include the wind and road noise for compatibility,” Clapper says.And this lab also helps Ford decide where and how and at what pitch to direct the noise, with technology like the sound symposer that tunes up the music on the Focus ST and the diaphragm on the Mustang GT that feeds into the cabin just beside the steering wheel to help give the driver a blast. Literally.