There is a shocking item on the BBC website, and seeing how unfortunate these owners have been, I’m so relieved I did not buy a Focus and instead chose the non-turbo Mazda3.
I love the ecoboost, wifes 1ltr fiesta would leave my 2ltr NC standing.
As I recall, the issues I read last year regarding the 1.litres surrounded the multiplicity of thermp / sensors, and coolant routings prone to failure after around as few as 30/40k miles.
I guess getting 2 litre ooomph out a tiny 4 pot is a black art of complexities.
Curiously, we did not choose the Mazda3 because of any performance advantage, it drove the same as the various models and years of Astra or Focus or Golf we tested (ie older non-turbo and new turbo).
It was not for fuel economy, the Mazda3 is significantly worse than all of them, but then for three to five thousand miles a year it does not matter.
It was not even because of the colour, Soul Red, when SWMBO wanted another pale blue car, and a one year old Astra was almost exactly right.
It was entirely because of the seats; only the Mazda3 seats did not interfere with the elbows of SWMBO when changing gear or using the handbrake, and she sat in it and said “This one will do.”
And I was very happy with a non-turbo car, having witnessed the several years of grief two of my neighbours had each been experiencing with the turbos in their sequences of Audis.
I had a 125 Ecoboost Focus for a time and it had good and bad points. The good was an amazingly refined and smooth engine , silent most of the time but with a wannabe a 911 note when roused . It was good on mpg too , once I had learned to ignore the marketing guff about its being torquey. It isn’t at all, let alone by 2 litre standards and whilst it will pull from low revs the acceleration was glacial. Changing up at 5000 most of the time , and using 5th and 6th as cruising gears only mpg went from high 30s to mid 40s .
Bad ? Appalling rev hang , making it feel like it had an Isambard Kingdom Brunel size fly wheel . This made quick gearchanging and heel and toe downchanges nearly impossible .
No reliability issues - but we only hear the bad news about cars , never good .
State of tune ? On one hand , it is amazing that a 3 cylinder family car has same bhp/litre as the Repco V8 in Jack Brabham’s 1966 F1 car -non turbo of course. But there are shed loads of cars pushing that out , and have been for years. Subaru and Mitsubishi 20 years ago and now just about every other hot hatch . Merc AMG is 150bhp plus /litre ,as is Honda Type R and many VAG four pot 2 litres.
It is still interesting to think that all those years ago the E-Type Jaguar had a claimed 265bhp from 4.2 litres - and in reality it was much closer to 200bhp. An Ecoboost of the same size would be developing 530bhp…