SO, we’re gonna have the emissions cheaters and the folks that can’t build a transmission correctly teaming up to out-Tesla Tesla?

I think around ‘15 or ‘16 they finally started offering a manual across all trims, but for the first several years of this version you’re right-manual was limited to the stripper trim and the ST.  If you wanted an SE or Titanium, you were stuck with the DCT.  

Sadly, I think you’d be surprised. My boss, a few months ago, had to have the trans replaced in her 3-year-old Focus. As soon as she got it back, she got rid of it, and ate the loss on the trade.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 at this point.  The Americans and Germans know at this point they don’t have the quality reputations, so they have to find another way to compete, which leads them to try leapfrogging the competition re: technology, which leads to the occasional engineering shortcut or outright cheat, which…

In school they told us the cops are our friends.  If that’s true, why aren’t they helping me load it in the car instead of yelling to give it away? 

Seems to depend on the car.  I had a rental with less than 20k that was already shot.  My boss had hers happen in year 3 (and she ate the loss on trade-in the day she had it back from the repairs just to get rid of it).  I’m guessing that it’ll catch up to all of ‘em at some point. 

In the case of Fusion, no. That one, by and large, seems to have a decent reputation for reliability.

Was it a grey 2016 hatchback? I had one of those as a rental last year, and the odometer reading was surprisingly low for a 2-year-old rental (like less than 20k IIRC).  And the one I had would either act like a newb learning to drive stick or freerev 1st until a sickening crunch and lurch as it slammed into 2nd.  

Pretty sure they’re somewhere in Euroland, which got a different and improved Focus for the 2nd and 3rd gens, while we got stuck with makeovers of the 1st gen up to 2012.  

Lol, maybe the regulators just expect Ford/GM to be junk so they don’t bother.  

At that point, they pretty much had to stick with it.  Changing right on the receipt of the legal papers would be seen as an admission they f----d up.  Keeping it going gave them the plausible deniability angles that the (really fantastic) Freep article cites them as having used.  

The gas thing was not user error. I saw and followed those directions. No filling after the pump kicked off, leaving the nozzle in for 10+ seconds afterward-didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter whether I had the clutch in or out, and once it started to sputter (if it didn’t just quit) not even giving it gas would save…

The Fusion had a random electrical issue that rendered the car completely dead in the driveway. Dealer alleges it was just a failed battery, but on a car less than a year old that seems really unlikely and they had it for 3 days. Heated seats failed after two years/45,000 miles, and it took two visits and 9 days for…

Fun fact: The early MTX-75s ate synchros, especially 3rd gear, like a fat man at a buffet. In the U.S., they first showed up in Contours and Mystiques. Around 2000, Ford developed and then changed the fluid spec to the so-called “Ford Honey,” along with revising the synchro designs to include double-synchros on 1, 2…

I had a ‘14 FiST for 3 years/39,000 miles before a minivan running a light totaled it. It was a ton of fun, but it was not a well-made car. Passenger rocker trim fell off three times, and the driver side rear fender popped loose a couple times. It would stall once as I waited to pull out into traffic every time I…

Had a ‘16 Focus as a rental last year to attend an out-of-state funeral. What an abominable POS! Car had less than 20K on it, and normal acceleration from a stop was either bucking and jerking like a new driver learning how to drive stick, -or- the engine seeming to rev freely while very little acceleration happened,…

It’s clean, manual, and would probably be a fun little summer ride.

I know Ford did some research on Methanol in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. I remember seeing images of a grey Fairmont marked as a methanol prototype. Not sure why they abandoned the research, but as I searched looking for images of that Fairmont I found an academic paper from 1988 that, at first glance, seems to suggest…

The question is the energy (and cost) to make the ethanol from the source material. Cane-sourced ethanol is cheap because cane is quite a lot more energy-rich than is corn. So, the cane-based ethanol will yield better economic outcome for the motorist than will our sorry corn gas.  This is why Brazil’s so keen on…

Worth noting, though, that there’s a difference between sugarcane-derived ethanol and the corn gas we use in the U.S..