People’s car versus people’s car
One corner. That’s all it takes. The slightest turn of the Ford’s wheel and you’re smiling. Where the Golf’s measured and the BMW meaty, the Focus feels alert, eager. This is the Ford’s USP: the ability to make a humdrum drive fun; every roundabout an arc of apexes to be kissed. Where the 1-series is all about taut, grippy, flat-stance cornering, the Focus is big on nailed-down front-end grip and a mobile, lightly oversteery rear axle. Both are fun, but a lot of the time it’s the Ford that gives you the bigger kicks.
The downside is that, as you experience them, you’ll be sitting in the drabbest interior here, by some margin. The inside of the Focus is underwhelming in isolation, but after the BMW and the VW it feels like a car from a decade ago. As interior tech increasingly becomes a differentiator and a key selling point, this deficiency can only put bigger dents in the Ford’s desirability.
Still, everything’s in the right place, and simplicity itself to operate. Where in the VW you’re cursing (with or without voice control), the Ford is on your side. It too has voice control and a prominent touchscreen, which thanks to fonts bigger than a pensioner’s phone is mostly straightforward to use. And, like the BMW, the air-con controls are good old-fashioned buttons. If a lorry ahead coughs out a load of carcinogens, you hit the recirculation button. In the VW, you delve into a menu.
Ride quality on the optional adaptive dampers is agreeable, too. It’s not as memory-foam supple as the VW, but smoother than the 1-series. Like the Golf, lowly Focus variants get a torsion beam at the back. More powerful variants, including this car, feature multi-link rear suspension (standard on the 1-series). The Ford’s set-up is most masterful, the only unwanted by-product of that refreshingly pliant tune being a little extra bobbing through fast, bumpy corners, the movement exacerbated by the Ford’s quick steering. But on bubblier UK roads, the Focus is outstandingly comfortable.
We’d pick the standard manual gearbox, however. Not just because it’s sweet (one of the best mainstream shifts around) but because the eightspeed auto in this test car is as slow-witted as its take-up in stop-start trac is abrupt. If you don’t want a manual, don’t buy the Ford.
Gearbox and flair-free interior aside, badge snobbery is the Focus’s main enemy in this company. Even in faux-hot-hatch ST Line spec and with bright red paint, the Focus struggles to get noticed next to the Touring Car 118i and Tate Modern Golf. But you can’t miss its price. Golf pricing in the UK is yet to be confirmed but expect it to start at around
£22,500 for a 1.0-litre petrol. The 1.5-litre Golf in toppy Style trim tested here equates to around £26k, but would be more given its options, including DCC and LED matrix headlights (which we’d pass on, given their lack of urgency to dim for oncoming cars at night during our test). The BMW starts in the mid-twenties for a 118i or 116d, with M Sport trim taking our test car to £27,230. (Our car’s option packs – including such goodies as digi-dials, HUD, heated screen and incredible stereo – take the price way past £30k, but that £27k is the key figure for a pared-back 118i M Sport.)
The Focus, meanwhile, can be had from £18.5k for a base-trim 1.0-litre, and a 1.5 in ST Line trim costs less than £24k (plus £800 for the adaptive dampers, and about a grand for the panoramic roo). Okay, so it’s not a huge a gulf in price, but it certainly helps give the Ford a handy tailwind.
The Focus also has the strongest engine here. The Ford’s all-aluminium triple is much more flexible and stronger to pull from low revs than the Golf’s, despite its cylinder shortfall. What’s more, its bigger pistons give it more torque – the Volkswagen and BMW feel a tad weedy by comparison. The EcoBoost is coarser than the Golf’s smooth four, and it has a thrummier note than the BMW triple, but you can’t argue with the in-gear pull from low revs.
So, buy your 1.5 Ford with the manual gearbox, and smile at a chassis that’s gloriously fluid, fluent and adjustable. Although the interior falls behind the others on design and quality, Ford’s ride/handling genius is enough to overshadow that at times. (It’s worth bearing in mind that the chassis of the Focus ST is even better, and the ST is not all that much more expensive than the BMW without options.) And smile because, while the Ford’s Sync infotainment feels conspicuously off the pace, CarPlay sidesteps that neatly. Smile too at what is appreciably the strongest engine here. That’s a lot of smiling. ⊲
The Focus is big on nailed-down front-end grip and a mobile, lightly oversteery rear