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Ford Focus Estate y2K model year. It looks great. Very distinctive and, like the old Peugeot 205, it will continue to look smart and up to date for years to come. However, there are some parts of this that work out not so good when you actually try to use the car. |
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Styling and Interior Shorter drivers will find the car hard to park as the front falls away out of sight. On the other hand, tall drivers will have a problem of their own. Because of the way that the bonnet curves, anyone over 180cm will be distracted by the resultant reflections of the road surface. If I owned one of these cars, I might consider washing the relevant bits of bodywork with a mixture of vim and valve grinding paste to take off the shine! As I drove along, I found that while the interior looked smart and funky, there were a number of things that didn't work so well. Several of the controls were positivly unpleasent to touch. Particularly the gear lever which had a hard cold texture. Also, the cup/can/bottle holders do not quite take a standard german cola bottle which is a bit remiss. They do take the equivalent French bottle. Go figure. |
One poor feature that fortunately did not affect me this time were the roof bars. They were heavily curved to follow the shape themes of the car. That's all very well and looks nice but have you ever tried to load a dining room table, bookcase or load of IKEA flat pack furniture onto curved roof bars? It's really not good enough because it indicates a large degree of thoughtlessness or worse in the design process. Good design should be a source of constant delight as we keep discovering things that are right about a design. Here, you just keep discovering more that is wrong. |
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