The Volkswagen Golf. The Vauxhall Astra. That medium-sized Toyota that is not called the Corolla any more. What is it called? It’s a name that’s sadly not on the tip of my tongue. My mind is blank. The Areola? Or is that the ring around your nipple? Whatever, the reason that I rarely test such cars on these pages, or on the television, is simple: what’s to say?
For some time car makers have been treading water in a stagnant pool. If they wanted to launch a new car, it was easy. They called a company that made shock absorbers, a company that made pistons and a company that made sat navs. Then got some Poles or Slovaks to Sellotape them together — et voilà.
In the mainstream there was no fizz, no drama, no inventiveness and no risk. It got to the point where Ford’s engineers made a big noise about the Focus having expensive-to-make independent rear suspension. Yes, this made it lovely to drive at the sort of speed it would never travel but, really, the main reason they were so proud is they had won a minor internal battle with the bean counters, who doubtless would have wanted them to use a cheaper fixed-axle setup like everyone else. Car-making. It had become accountancy.
But a man called Swampy had taken up residence in a tunnel just outside Newbury in Berkshire and started talking about something called “the environment”. Now there had been lots of anti-state, anti-system Swampies in the past, shouting about workers’ rights and peace and communism, but none had gained any traction with the middle classes. So they had remained a noisy but minority interest, like bell-ringing.
Swampy, though, had hit upon an idea that did strike a chord with the nation’s jam makers. They liked gardening. They liked peace and quiet. They liked the idea of this young man in his dirty trousers trying to stop the government building a bypass. So suddenly he was joined in his campaign by lots of ladies in camel-hair coats.
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It wasn’t just in Newbury, either. Environmentalism was taking off all around the world. Leninism had a new face. It was the face of a drowning polar bear. And everyone seemed to like it.
To show they were in tune with the times, politicians started to make green noises, too. Mr Cameron went on a plane to the Arctic to look at a dog and then put a small wind turbine on his house. In America a former presidential candidate called Al Gore made a film called Workers’ Control of Factories. And global warming became the new terror.
Naturally the motorcar was quickly identified as the main problem. Not only did it allow workers personal freedom but also it produced vast quantities of carbon dioxide from its tailpipe . . . as a direct result of environmentalists insisting in the Eighties that it had to be fitted with a catalytic converter. A device that converts gases that don’t warm the planet into CO2. Which does, apparently.
So every year governments imposed tougher and tougher legislation that forced car makers to wake up. They were being forced by law to make their products chew less fuel. This meant they had to get inventive. And while I don’t like the reasoning behind that, I do like the results. Mainstream cars are getting interesting again.
We now have hybrids, and I love the way they obey the letter of the law but completely ignore its spirit. Because how can a car with two powerplants possibly be good for the planet? It can’t. These cars — they’re tools for fools.
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More recently we have been seeing some clever variations on the hybrid theme. From Vauxhall there’s the Ampera and from a small firm in America there’s the Fisker Karma, which works like a diesel-electric locomotive. Elsewhere people are working on hydrogen fuel cells, and there are pure electric cars, too, such as the Nissan Leaf. But the less we say about those, the better. Because let’s be clear. They are interesting to write about, but . . . They. Do. Not. Work.
They are expensive to buy, their ecological benefits are debatable — they run on power that comes from Drax B — and if you want the costly battery pack to last, it takes several hours to charge it up. This means it would take several days to drive from London to Edinburgh.
All of which brings me to the Ford Focus you see in the pictures this morning. It’s called the EcoBoost and it meets the new green legislation in the cleverest, simplest, bestest way yet. It runs on an engine so small, the cylinder block would sit neatly on a piece of A4 paper. That small.
And before you think that a 999cc three-cylinder engine could not possibly produce enough power to move a car as large as a Focus, look at the figures. It produces 123 brake horsepower — exactly what was delivered by Ford’s old 1.6 Focus. But amazingly you get more torque and, of course, greatly reduced fuel consumption.
This best-of-all-worlds solution has been achieved thanks to some extremely clever thinking. The torque comes from a very long piston stroke and a turbocharger that can spin at up to 248,000rpm. That’s 16 times faster than the blades in a jet engine.
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There’s more. In most engines the pressure on the top of the piston is around 150 pounds per square inch (psi). In a normal turbo that might get as high as 200psi. But in the EcoBoost’s micro-motor it’s more than 350psi.
Then there’s the detailing. The cam belt runs in oil so it’s silent and will last for ever. Ford has even split the cooling system so that the business part of the engine and the people in the car can warm up as quickly as possible on cold mornings. And the exhaust manifold is water-cooled as well. It’s probably fair to say that there is more innovation and technology in this engine than you find in a Lamborghini V12.
Which is why I was so cross with the elderly Australian tourist I encountered on London’s Kensington High Street recently. “Why are you driving this piece of shit?” he asked. I explained that I was testing it and that, actually, it was rather interesting. But that didn’t calm him down one jot. He was so angry that I should be driving such a thing, he started hitting it with his shopping bags. “It’s shit!” he screamed. “And you should know better.”
It’s not, though. It’s great. There’s so much torque that you can spin the wheels into second, and it’ll easily hold its own with Johnny Van Driver in a traffic-light grand prix. And best of all, because the engine is so light, some of the agility that’s gone missing from recent Focuses is back. To drive, it is brilliant, and apart from a gruff but rather endearing three-cylinder engine noise, there’s simply no indication at all that you are being pulled along by an engine the size of Richard Hammond’s left testicle.
Inside? Well, it’s a Focus. It’s spacious, and my test car was loaded up with every conceivable extra. The only item I wouldn’t bother with is the lane assist. You get a barely detectable wheel wobble and small red light on the dash if you wander out of your lane on the motorway, but, I’m sorry, if you haven’t noticed you’re about to crash into a bridge parapet, you’re unlikely to be brought to your senses by what looks like the standby light on a television.
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That’s it, though. The only real fault I could find in what’s certainly the most important Ford since the Cortina.
And now we get to the clincher. A top-of-the-range Toyota Prius is around £24,910. With the £5,000 government grant, an all-electric Leaf will cost you £25,990 and a Vauxhall Ampera £32,250. Prices for a similarly sized, faster and nicer-to-drive Focus EcoBoost start at £16,445. I could go on. But there seems little point.