Re: Why doesn\'t Ford boost their compacts?
a boosted focus would definitly be faster or extremely easy to make faster than a mustang for ALOT less than the cost of a mustang. They want people to pay more for more power not less. All about money not trends, sucks if u ask me. Ford of Europe is where its at.
You have to compare a factory setup to a factory setup to be fair, and looking at the market the price point and performance they are getting from the 'Stang isn't that easy to dismiss. The Mustang GT is offering 300hp and 320ftlbs in an attractive modern chassis w/ decently wide rear tires to effetively put that power down for $24.4K MSRP. If you look at what you are getting for that, that is VERY cheap!
Trying to think of other vehicles in that power range, and I can only think of the WRX STi, and its over $30K... and its not because its so overly luxurious as I much prefer the SVT Focus interior to the STis. Now the SRT-4's power levels are more realistic (also gets to share it with the PT-Cruiser for cost effectiveness) but thats at $21K and is EXTREMELY "cheap" when you compare it to an SVT Focus which is a Bentley by comparison. So realistically, even if you were only aiming for 220 or so horses (which is where you start running into power management issues on FWD) I think a car as nicely equiped as the Focus would probably have an MSRP pretty close to if not higher than the Mustang GT. Mustang GT is a much easier sell on the name alone in America I think, and they want(ed) the SVT Focus to help boost the image of the regular bread+butter Focus and fill the $19K range performance market. And if you checked all the reviews it was pretty unanimous that the SVT Focus beat both its most popular boosted counterparts, the Mini Cooper S and VW GTi, so I would say Ford was pretty successful! If anything, I would have just liked them to make the SVT a little lighter as that would help overall performance (although not so much acceleration) and distinguish it as a different kind of sporty car from the Stang. That way you have no overlap and you might even end up with people buying both. Hell, if I were in the market and had to buy new, I'd probably get a Mustang GT to hot-rod as a weekend car and 5-door SVT Focus as my more practical daily sport-ride.
Obviously I think a turbo Focus would be sweet... I have one... but I can understand why they didn't offer it when I saw what the anticipated costs (after the initial complications too) of the Focus RS would be in the states. A somewhat weak turbo setup like on the GTI wouldn't be boosting power levels all that much, and unlike VW they aren't going to be using a small boosted engine in tons of other US vehicles to keep costs down (hell it took me a second to think of VWs that don't come with the 1.8T heh).
