15 Apr 08
It may be comfortable, but I'm not sure on first appraisal quite how sold I am on the direction the company's interior design is taking.
Quite a bit of the instrumentation looks a tad fiddly compared to the simple, big button philosophy of the early Focus days. Then again, this top-of-the-range Titanium X model is equipped with what Ford call their 'Premium Convers+ instrument cluster' allied to an optional DVD navigation system. The upshot being not only a seven inch touch screen in the centre console for accessing, well, pretty much everything, but also another screen between rev' counter and speedometer for accessing, well, pretty much everything else. I'll let you know if it's possible to play with it without crashing in my next report.
Although the Focus' navigation system has proved far from intuitive over the last few months, I now consider it almost essential in preventing my wife reverting to type and driving everywhere new via some past remembered point of reference. Such as Crystal Palace. Not good if your journey takes you from Oxford to Winchester.
Just how well the 2.0 litre turbodiesel with continuously variable suspension damping lives up to the imperious standards set by the Focus, I'll let you know next time. Along with, of course, how well the children get on in the back. That waistline does get awfully high astern. After the nosy-parker joys of successive 4x4s, I do hope they can see out...
