"Wild East" adventure with my son in a rented Focus

[WriConsult]

Just got back from a 4-day vacation with my kid. We decided to have a "Wild West" (as most of you folks would call it) themed camping adventure in Eastern Oregon. We dug fossils, gawked at numerous ghost towns, checked out mining equipment and gold nuggets from Baker City's gold rush, rode an old steam train (complete with a staged "robbery" carried out by "bandits" on horseback), enjoyed a movie in a 1920s small-town theater and rockhounded for obsidian. I'll add some photos to this thread in a few days.

We ended up putting almost 1100 miles on a rented Focus. Ours ended up being an SEL model loaded up with a sunroof (nice), automatic climate control (ugh), leather (double ugh), Sync (triple ugh), reverse sensing (surprisingly handy, given the blind spots) and 17" aluminum wheels. After living out of this thing for a few days, here's a mini-review:

• Handling: corners almost as flat and firm as my Elantra Touring, which is to say a lot better than most cars out there. Has the same numb steering as most other EPS-equipped cars today, though, and on the twisties it didn't always feel like the car was going to go in precisely the direction I was trying to point it. Not as confidence inspiring as you'd expect from a car with a good suspension, though I eventually got more or less used to it.
• Engine: 160hp, way more than I need. Used it a couple of times to see what it could do, and it is fast. We'll get to mpg in a moment -- scroll down for that.
• Transmission: first automated-manual that I've driven. Like many people I found that the car would first hesitate on takeoff, then jerk forward. On shifts, the car would sometimes shudder for a bit before locking in gear. Manual mode was WAY easier to use than on the Forte I recently rented. "S" mode causes the transmission to use engine braking if you don't do anything, but also enables manual mode via the up/down buttons on the shift lever, which works great. And even in "D" it was pretty easy to get it to shift by 2000rpm or so without heavily FSing it. Despite the jerkiness, I could more happily live with this AT than most.
• Tires: The P215/50R17 Contis provided VERY impressive grip on dry pavement, probably saving me from hitting a deer on Saturday night. Despite having cut my teeth in deer-infested MN, I had my closest call ever, stopping literally less than 2' short of hitting one. On the other hand, although we didn't drive on dirt roads very much, the short sidewalls and low ground clearance were definitely a liability there.
• Space: not bad overall and the trunk is pretty big (floor 40" front-to-back), but rear legroom seems a bit tight for this class. The large center console cuts into the driver's sense of space a bit, and doesn't offer much space to quickly set down small items like sunglasses. The sunroof also cuts severely into headroom: I tried using a chair cushion to avoid sticking to the stupid leather on this sunny trip, but even though I'm height-challenged it literally pushed my head up against the headliner and I had to downgrade to a towel. And while I'm on the subject, I've never seen a power driver's seat without a height adjustment before.
• Controls: O M G. Worst I've ever seen, maybe because this car was Sync equipped. Car has two small MFD screens, and three sets of up/down/left/right/OK controls. I sat in the rental agency parking lot for 5 minutes trying to figure out how to tune the radio manually, rather than across the presets chosen by the previous renter with really bad taste in stations. Doing anything requires wading through menus, sometimes several levels of them, and the controls are really slow to respond. Resetting the trip counter requires holding down the OK button for 5 seconds instead of the usual second or two, and you have to do it separately for the mpg, time and distance functions. Part of the complexity is just too damned many features: for example, although my son really enjoyed that I could change the footwell lighting between white, pink, purple, green, teal, blue, red and orange ("make it purple, dad!") the feature only sometimes worked and just amounted to more buttons and controls to know about. And more potential distractions: the amount of driver attention required to perform some common tasks on this car is just plain dangerous, and is going to kill innocent people over time. Hopefully the non-Sync version is simpler to use. There were a lot more annoyances in how various controls worked than I'm mentioning here, but you get the idea.

Review bottom line: Overall I did enjoy the Focus, and probably could live with one if it were an SE with the base wheels/tires, MT and no leather or sync. But I still like my car more, and with the new GT it will get at least the mpg of the Focus.

And speaking of mpg ... this was a challenging drive. Eastern Oregon is VERY mountainous. By my count we climbed at least 15 mountain passes, reaching elevations up to 7300' above our starting point. We did at least 35,000' feet of major climbs (not counting smaller hills), and many of the downhills required significant braking so much of the climbing couldn't be offset by coasting. Also, the last 300 miles home were directly into a steady 20+mph headwind. In my leadfoot days, a trip like this would have yielded well under the EPA highway mpg.

So what's the bottom line on mpg? Despite adverse conditions, the Focus (EPA rated at 27/37) returned 42.1mpg overall (in-dash FCD figure was 40.7mpg, BTW). Absolutely fantastic for an AT rental car on a drive like this. It did help that I kept the speeds under 60mph and P&Ged (always ICE-on) heavily, which did wonders: using a P&G range of about 45-60mph, I was able to maintain an indicated 40mpg or so into that monster headwind on Sunday.

[ALS]

Forty plus mpgs is impressive for that car under those conditions. As I pointed out in another thread that one of my employees has a 2000 with an auto-box and the 2.0L and he gets 35 mpg's at 67-68 mph with cruise control across the state on the Pa Turnpike.

So it looks like this new Focus is another 40 mpg car we can choose from.

[WriConsult]

Google Maps route profiles in case anyone's interested:

Day 1: Portland to Dixie Summit (campground) via Condon, Fossil and Long Creek
Day 2: Campground round-trip to Baker City via Whitney, Sumpter, and Anthony Lakes
Day 3: Campground round-trip to Sumpter, returning via Granite and Greenhorn ghost towns
Day 4: Campground back to Portland via Strawberry Mountains and Glass Buttes

[frv]

Great post Wri. Sounds like the Focus served you well on that trip.

I don't like leather seats either - it would put me off buying a car if it had them.
Way too hot in summer (and no, I don't want to run the engine before I get in just to make them bearable) and cold in winter (I don't like heated seats either - I get too hot and then feel like I have to keep my back off the seat until it cools down).
Just my opinion of course - I know they last longer but that's not an issue for me as we don't do stellar miles.