Used Ford Focus - Perhaps The Best Value Car On The Market?

Used Ford Focus

EVERYBODY remembers their first car. The graduation from foot to four wheels affords adolescents the world over with an entirely new liberty, a freedom to roam wherever their whim or the road may take them. The day the keys to your first car are placed in your hand is one of the great and most pivotal moments you will ever experience in your life. It sits right up there with other important firsts: your first day at school, your first house* or your first kiss; and, just like these other formative moments, there's a certain expectation of progression.

Take that first day of school for instance. It's exciting and fresh and even a little scary, but in no time at all you've found that you've outgrown the confines and strictures of primary education, and so, in time, you advance to secondary school!

And that first house: a grimy bedsit on the wrong side of the tracks in a rougher part of town, sure, but after a little while, you'll (possibly) become financially stable enough to consider your next abode, a little less grimy, and slightly closer to a nicer part of town.

Or the kiss! The kiss that becomes a - well anyway! You get the idea.

Be it a banger or something a bit special, from that moment you first sit behind the wheel of your very own car, somewhere, a clock begins to count down. It counts away the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or maybe even years that it takes for you to become restless, dissatisfied - ready for a change.

My first car was a smashing little Japanese supermini. I'd never loved anything as much as I loved that car (except maybe Hammie the Hamster. We miss you Hammie), and yet, in spite of that, it wasn't long before I outgrew it. I needed a Grown-Up car.

Like Icarus, I had some quite lofty ambitions. A second-hand Golf TDi perhaps, or maybe a Seat Tenerife. Possibly I would be more comfortable in an older car, a Mercedes maybe or how about a Triumph Spitfire? My chief advisor throughout the process was my dad, and like all good sons, I ignored every word he said. It was very easy to ignore him, it didn't take a lot of concentration; he tended only to utter two words: Ford Focus. He was my father! What was I supposed to do, heed his advice or something?

So for 5 months or so I drove around in a Polo GTi. The experience was characterised by discomfort and mysterious electrical faults. Next, (for a whole week) I owned an MGB GT, but when I worked out the reason the interior smelled so strongly of petrol (the top of the fuel tank had rusted away, petrol literally spilled into the cabin every time the car cornered. Oh, and I live in B-Road country), it had to go. Next was a fifteen year old Mercedes-Benz, but the 3.2l straight six had a bit of a drinking problem, so at nearly £1 per litre of fuel, it was too expensive a car to run.

And the funny thing is, with each successive ridiculous car I purchased, there was always a quiet yet persistent voice telling me to buy a nice, tidy Ford Focus, with about 30,000 miles on the clock, ideally a diesel.

After very little deliberation at all in fact, I decided to go for it. I picked up a 1.8 TDCI in Pacific Green, and I've been its happy owner for 18 months - my longest relationship to date, in fact! (With a car). The only downside is: I can always here a tiny voice whispering 'I told you so'. Cheers dad.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay titled A Room of One's Own. In those glorious pre-war days, accommodation was as plentiful as it was affordable. Fast-forward to 2009 and the picture is a little different. Now it's automobiles that are plentiful, and if you're in the market for A Car of One's Own, you could do much worse than to go for an affordable second hand model. You could even learn from my experience and cut straight to the chase! Approved used Fords (particularly the Focus) represent exceptionally good value for money, why bother with anything less?

*good luck with that, have you seen the economy recently?