[ChazInMT]

Just got back from Europe after renting a 2012 Focus Wagon for 3 weeks and driving it all over Poland, here's my take on it.

Engine, Epic Fail...Anemic as heck, Gasoline engine, I swear the thing had no guts whatsoever, it had almost no torque up to 2300 rpm, then it only barely started to get out of its own way, and instead of pulling harder as the rpm's climbed it just stayed flat till 5500 rpm, then it pittered away. So it was slow.

Fuel economy wise, for something that had such a small engine, pretty much sucked too, I got 7L/100Km for average, but at it's best, it was still only 6.3L/100km. 33-37 MPG. Awful for something I was hoping to get in the low 40's with. Gas was $7 per gallon in Poland and $9 gallon in Germany.

The car was pretty from the outside, black, very nice looking.

We used the wagon feature to haul home a bicycle, it was fairly roomy as a wagon. The seats were comfortable, and finishes were nice. The driver & front passenger seats were cramped sort of, it seemed like they wanted to fill as much space as possible with the dash and center consul as possible. I don't know what the reason for this could be other than safety, but it just didn't feel airy, you felt very enclosed.

It had a Garmin nav system on a stalk attached to the bottom of the a pillar, it was too low to allow the Garmin to be horizontally positioned, so it was always sort of tilted on the dash. I got sick of trying to deal with the thing at the end of the trip because the touch screen was awful. If you pushed the zoom buttons, unless you were really, really, careful, it would think you touched the map behind and wanted to zoom in on it, and if you touched an object it knew about, it put up this "dialog box" that told you about it, that when you touched it, it would go to yet another screen. Also when you tried to pan the screen around using your finger, it would get a mind of its own and zoom past what you wanted to see and just keep going, or it would unnervingly go in some odd direction or even backwards from your finger slide, it was darn near useless. I had my own navaid that I used at the end, it's a Garmin as well, but night & day difference in usability.
Sorry, that's more of a Garmin rip. Not really focus related.

Ride & Handling were amazing, it really cornered well and smoothed out the bumps great, perfect balance here on these points. The brakes were a bit grabby at times, it went from medium braking power to full lock in a very small amount of pedal travel, so any kind of "panic" tap on the brakes were really abrupt.

So, if this had a better diesel engine with 42 mpg at least and more power, this car would have been great, as it was, I did not like it.