Re: Buying, Owning, Driving and Maintaining a car in North America Will be getting a 2011 Ford Focus SEL for the wifey sometime this week. It has 25K miles on the odo.
Other cars that were test driven and rejected were:
1. 2007 Jag X Type with 70K miles (black color). Jag from outside and Ford (2004 era) from inside. Had very stiff steering as well, which would have made parking painful. Asking price was 16K. Although AWD was one big positive, still the dated interiors and stiff steering combined with some known issues with X type came together to strike it off the list.
2. 2007 Jag X Type with 60K miles (green, not the British Racing Green though): Same as above.
3. 2008 Honda Accord LX with 8K miles (black). Yes, that is right. It had only 8K miles. Apparently it was owned by an old gentleman who used it only for grocery runs and city runabouts. The low miles were a plus but the number of years on it made those low miles a negative too. The car did look like a 5 year old car and had a few scratches on the body as well as ton of swirl marks. It looked as if its owner had spent more time just sitting inside the car than driving it.
4. Altima and Malibu: Clubbing them together because both of them were pretty regular cars. Nothing wrong with them, its just that they were somewhat boring.
Finally, after all this, the Focus SEL seems to tick all the right boxes. Comes with decent level of equipment (leather interiors, sunroof, heated seats, fog lamps etc etc), is not boring to drive, comfortable enough for the wife to handle, good mileage, a color that she likes and well within the budget (which i like!!)
Here are a couple of snaps from the dealer listing:
EDIT: I guess since these pictures have not been clicked by me, i need to mention the source. This is the link to the autotrader posting of this car: http://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-s...ngId=332418827
Last edited by amitoj : 25th December 2012 at 01:26.
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