The Ford Focus ST Is a Great Bargain Hot Hatchback

This is a 2013 Ford Focus ST, and it's a great hot hatchback, and it's becoming even greater as these are getting older and more affordable. Today, I'm going to review this Focus ST, one of my favorite hot hatchbacks from the modern era. Before I get started, big news. This Focus ST is currently for sale being auctioned live on Cars and Bids, my enthusiast car auction website. This is a 2013 model, the first year, in Performance Blue, the best color, and it is a one-owner car. The seller bought this car new in September 2013, and now he's selling it on Cars and Bids. So, after you finish watching this video, click the link in the description below to check out the auction for this Focus ST, and you can bid on it and win it and buy it on Cars and Bids at CarsAndBids.com. So let's talk Focus ST. This version of the Ford Focus came out for the 2012 model year, and the sporty ST version followed in 2013, and it was fantastic on paper. For about the same price as a 200-horsepower Volkswagen GTI, the ST offered 250 horsepower and a six-speed manual transmission and a four-door body style, which made it practical. The Focus ST also signaled the revival of the hot hatchback in Ford's lineup here in North America, and its success paved the way for the arrival of the more powerful all-wheel-drive Focus RS a few years later. Unfortunately, Ford has now canceled the Focus here in North America in the wake of crossovers and SUVs increasing in popularity. Even though the performance versions of the Focus were pretty popular, they're all gone now, and that means no more Focus ST. But the Focus ST still lives on on the used market. I thought these cars were bargains when they were new, but they're even better bargains now that they're getting older and becoming more affordable. So today, I am going to review this Focus ST in case you're looking for a hot hatchback, but you don't want to spend a fortune. First, I'm going to show you around the Focus ST and show you all of its interesting quirks and features, then I'll get it out on the road and drive it, and then I'll give it a Doug score. All right, I'm going to start the quirks and features of the Focus ST with one of my very favorite quirks, and that would be the fuel door. You look back here and you don't see a fuel door anywhere, no typical circular fuel door like you'd expect. No surprise, of course, you just go over to the other side of the car, except it isn't there either. No fuel door on that side either. So where did Ford hide it? It's right here, actually, you push here and this little panel opens and the fuel door opens up. They've hidden it basically within the lines of the car, which is a really neat trick with the design of this generation Focus. Most people probably won't notice it, but it's a lot better to integrate it and to make it so subtle as opposed to just having a circular fuel door on the side of the car, like basically everything else. This is a neat trick, and frankly, I wish more cars would do stuff like this. But anyway, next we're going to climb into the Focus ST, and you know you're climbing into an ST because when you open the door, the door sill says ST with some chevrons on either side. That's how you know your car is fast, when it has chevrons on the door sill. But anyway, you climb inside, one of the first things you notice is these seats, these Recaro sport seats that look pretty impressive for a relatively affordable hot hatchback. They're grippy, they're well bolstered, they say ST embroidered on the top. They look like the kind of thing you would find in a very true sports car, not necessarily a hotted up Ford Focus like this. And next up, another item you notice when you get in here, the manual transmission. These came standard with a six-speed manual, and there was no way to get a Focus ST with an automatic, which made this a real enthusiast car. Compare that to the Volkswagen GTI, this car's closest competitor. Those were offered with an automatic, more tame driving experience than the Focus ST. That was also true with power. Like I mentioned before, these had about 250 horses, and the GTI from this era had about 200 horses. So this car, with its mandatory manual transmission and more power, had some real benefits over the GTI. But it also had some drawbacks, and probably the biggest is interior quality. GTI interiors, even back in 2013, looked pretty nice, almost like a budget Audi. This car wasn't quite on that level, and interior quality just wasn't as nice as Volkswagen. Some good examples of that. One is this little plastic piece surrounding the bottom of the parking brake. You can see it's like textured plastic, and it almost matches up with the rest of the textured plastic in this area, but not quite. It's just a slightly different texture and a slightly different color. You would think Ford would get that right and those would match, but just not quite, even though it seems so easy. Here's another quality deficit with this car. In the center of the steering wheel, you can see the horn icons, and if you press it, of course, the horn will sound. But if you also press this little silver part over by the volume controls, if you push that hard enough, you can see it also kind of bends in, and it too will sound the horn. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but it certainly isn't the best look that the horn extends far beyond the intended horn to the rest of the steering wheel. It just wasn't the nicest car in here. It didn't have the highest quality interior, and to me, it always felt like this was more geared for drivers. The money had been spent on the performance and the power, not the interior quality, and frankly, that showed. But anyway, moving on to some interesting quirks in this car. For one thing, there is no map light in the usual place, like right above the front seats. Instead, you have a sunglasses holder in here. You can push the little sunglasses and it pops down and you can put your sunglasses in there, but you see no lights in this area at all, which is very unusual. Instead, you have lights for the individual seats. So the driver's seat has a little light right above it, and you have these little buttons you can use to control it, turn the light on or off. Same deal over on the passenger side. It has its own little light right above the passenger seat, and you can use this button to turn it on or off. So there are lights, but they're not in the usual map light position. But in the map light position, you do have some interesting buttons worth mentioning. Over on the right, you have the button that controls the sunroof, not that unusual. Next one, this button, if you press it, turns on the ambient lighting in this car. So even though the ambient lights aren't right here, they still turn on with a button located here. It's a little dial that adjusts the brightness and dimming of the interior lights. But the next button is my favorite. That looks like it has a little painter's palette on it. So what the hell does that do? You press that and some paints appear? No, instead, that changes the color of the ambient lighting in this car. You had several different configurable colors you could use depending on your mood at the time. And if you press that, it would cycle through all of the different ambient lighting colors, but I prefer the painter's palette because it gave you different colors of ambient light. A very interesting button. You don't see that icon too often. And there are some other quirks worth noting in this interior. For one thing, in the center, the dials to control the climate vents airflow are huge and they're very prominent. Most automakers go to a lot of trouble of hiding these, getting them out of the way so you don't see them in the interior. Not Ford. You have these massive dials that you can use to adjust the center climate vents, almost like they were trying to make them a style item, but no surprise, it doesn't work. Next up, here's another fun quirk I like. This car has no sport button, which is surprising. It's a sporty car. You'd think it would have a little sport button that maybe would tighten up the steering, improve the throttle response, but it doesn't. However, if you press the traction control off button, that engages sport mode. It's pretty cool. That's a real driver's sport mode. You don't have a stupid sport button. Instead, you turn traction control off. That's your sport button. You better know how to handle the car with traction control off. Next up, another interesting item in this car. In the center console, you have your heated seat controls. Now, to me, this is way too prominent of a place to have heated seat controls, but that's where they put them. The weird thing about these controls, though, is there are five different levels of seat heating in this car. Just in case somehow your butt is sensitive enough to tell the difference between level three heated seat and level four heated seat, well, here you go. You have five different levels. Next up, another weird item in this car. If you open up the glove box, you have a little slot on the inside of your glove box door. That is a credit card slot, surprisingly, I guess. So if you want to leave a credit card in this car, or if you have a parking garage card you want to stick in there, you have a place for it in your glove box. It'll be hidden, and it fits neatly in that spot. Also located in your glove box is, of course, your owner's manual pouch. Nothing particularly interesting in here, except that the quick start guide says on it Ford Focus 2000 ampersand 13. Why do this, Ford? Why not just write the numbers 2013 like everybody else? Why do you have to get cute about it? This is some owner's manual front cover designer justifying his existence. Look, I wrote 2000 ampersand 13. Very cool. Anyway, next up, another interesting quirk in this car, something I've always loved about these Focuses is the mirror. They have this little magnifying mirror built into the top right corner. I never really realized how useful these magnifying mirrors were until I bought a used car that had one installed. It's very helpful, and it's nice to see this car has one from the factory. Makes lane changes just a little bit easier. Next up, I want to talk tech in this car. In the center of this control stack, you have a screen. This is Ford's SYNC system from 2013. There are a lot of complaints about how it operated, but frankly, I don't think it's that bad. It's actually more responsive than I would expect considering this car's age. As you can see, it responds relatively well, and it's pretty intuitive to use, although that's not true of the navigation part of it. Going to navigation, you can see just how slow it is to respond to basically any command. It is not quick, does not feel like a smartphone, but the rest of SYNC is pretty good, especially given this car's price point and its age, it's a decent system. Now, speaking of screens in this car, you also have a screen in the gauge cluster. Just a little one, but it gives you basic vehicle information. It's somewhat configurable, and you can choose some settings in there. One thing that I find interesting in the trip odometer, it counts your miles, your fuel economy, but it also gives you a timer that counts down to the last second since you've reset it, which is weird. This one hasn't been reset in a long time, and so it's over six hours counting with the timer, each second being counted off. Not really sure if that's relevant for people driving, but I guess maybe it could be. Now, one interesting thing you'll notice in the gauge cluster, this car has a speedometer that goes up to 280, which is probably a pretty optimistic speed for a Focus ST, but this car was sold new in Canada, so that speedometer is in kilometers per hour, and that's why it goes so fast, an interesting quirk of this Focus ST. And next up, we move on to the back seat in the Focus ST, and you can see it isn't really all that big. My knees are right up against the back of the front seat, although I will say these Recaro seats do have a massive cutout in the back of them for knees to go, and so I can sit back here not incredibly comfortably, but it is possible. Still, even though it's not tremendously roomy back here, it's more practical than sports cars. That's always been kind of the benefit of hot hatchbacks. They offer sports car performance, but with hatchback practicality, and this car is no exception. Now, speaking of the back seat, unfortunately, it's not quite as cool back here as it is up front with those beefy Recaro seats. You can see the seats back here are quite a bit tamer by comparison. They do not have ST embroidered. They do not have all the bolstering of the front seats. You just have a fairly typical rear seat, although you do have some white stitching, which looks nice, but it's not as fun in back for sure. Now, two interesting quirks back here. For one, you have a little storage area in the door panel where you can put stuff, of course, but if you have too much stuff to store in that panel, you also have a little storage area next to the seat, like above the floor between the seat and the door, and You actually have another storage area next to the seat, further up next to the door panels. There are several different little hidden storage compartments back here, a nice little practical spot in this car, otherwise it would be wasted space, so why not stick a storage area in there? I like that thinking. The other interesting quirk back here is on the ceiling. You can see the dome light is exactly the same one I showed you as on the front seats, except back here, you don't have any controls for it like you do up front, just blanks on either side. So that same dome light housing is used front and back, and even though the back has no controls at all, I guess Ford must have figured out it was just cheaper to make this same dome light housing for everywhere in the car, rather than make a different one in back that was just a light. Interesting to see that. And next up, we move on to the cargo area, but before we do that, one interesting quirk back here on the rear glass, you can see a little heating element going under the rear wiper back here. They do that, obviously, if you live in a cold place, so your wiper doesn't get frozen to your back window. You turn on your rear defroster, and it will also unfreeze your rear wiper, which is a cool idea, and I like how it sort of zigzags up and down to make sure it gets all the ice around the wiper, whether it's a little bit above or a little bit below. That's a neat trick. Now, one other thing I like with the tailgate back here, you open up the tailgate, and you can see that it opens just high enough that it misses the antenna on the top of the car. You can see there's just a little gap between the antenna and the tailgate. Obviously, Ford had to make sure to place the antenna in exactly the right spot when they were building these cars so that the tailgate with its spoiler wouldn't hit it. It's just interesting to see how close they come. When you get back here, though, in the cargo area, you can see not really anything special, and it's not exactly huge back here. It's just a fairly normal-sized cargo area and a fairly normal-sized hot hatchback, but again, neat to have a cargo area at all in a performance car like this. Next up, since I'm on the outside of this car, let's talk exterior styling for a second. I have always loved how this car looks. I liked this generation of Focus to begin with, and they added just the right amount of cool-looking stuff, like flared side skirts and a different front end and a spoiler in back just to make it a little bit cooler and just fun enough without being, like, over-the-top hot hatchy trying too hard, and I think they did a great job of that. I also love this color, Performance Blue, Ford called it. It suited the car perfectly. Ford later got rid of it, replaced it with a different blue, but I always thought that was a mistake. This was the right color for the car. I love cars in their original press photo color, and that was Performance Blue for the Focus ST when it first came out. I also loved these wheels. I think these wheels looked great on this car, sort of like a Lamborghini look to them almost. Ford also ditched the wheels later in the Focus ST's run, and they went with these, which I never felt looked sporty enough. They were more of a luxury-looking wheel and didn't emphasize this car's sportiness, but This car, with these wheels and this color, is always how I envision the Focus ST. Probably the only drawback is in front. You have this wider grille, but you also have the front license plate. It kind of detracts from this car's aggressive Focus ST-like front end. It's kind of a shame. It looks kind of weird on there. And finally, we move under the hood to one of this car's very best attributes. Its engine. Two-liter turbocharged EcoBoost four-cylinder. This engine was in everything Ford was making at the time. It was in Fords. It was in Lincolns. It was in Volvos. It was even in a Land Rover. Even the Ford Explorer used this engine, but it was especially potent in the Focus ST, made about 250 horsepower, a little more, and 0-60 was around 6.1 seconds, which made it a little bit quicker than the Volkswagen GTI from this period. It was a good, healthy horsepower number, especially at this price point for a hot hatchback, 250 horses, and it's getting more appealing as these cars are getting cheaper. And so those are the quirks and features of the wonderful Ford Focus ST. Now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives. All right, driving the Focus ST. The thing about this car, when it first came out, you could tell pretty quickly that there were some drawbacks, there were some pros, and there were some cons, and everything about this car was going to be decided by how it drove, meaning that you knew the interior was never as nice as Volkswagen. So you knew going into it, we had that drawback. And it was Ford. They didn't have a reputation for making good hot hatchbacks in the States. And so you just weren't sure if Ford could really pull this off. Worse interior, no long history like the GTI. Now there were some pros. It had more power. It looked cool. So you had some, and it's six-speed manual, standard. You had some benefits, you had some drawbacks. And the question was, I remember thinking this, the moment the car was announced, how will it drive? That will determine how this car is remembered. Either it's great, or it goes down as yet another example of American automaker trying to do something that foreign brands do, but failing, like when Ford came out with the Mercury Capri to take on the Miata, and they thought consumers would prefer it because it has back seats. So driving experience was always going to be the make or break thing with this car. And I got to tell you, it drives great. I love, love, love, and always have, how the Focus ST drives. I think it is a fantastic car. Two big benefits with the driving experience. One is the performance. Zero to 60 is about six seconds, but that's deceptive. That doesn't seem all that fast. First off, eight years ago when this came out, that was pretty fast. But it also just feels faster than that. It's like the Fiesta ST, which I also, that's like zero to 60 at seven and a half, but it feels so much fun. And this car is like that. It's not like a BMW or a fast Mercedes, where you're so insulated that you have to go zero to 60 in three and a half seconds to feel fast. This thing feels fast at six seconds, zero to 60, because it's an affordable hatchback. You feel the road, you see the road, you're part of the road. And so it feels quick, it feels like a lot of fun, just accelerating hard. Of course, you're going through the gears. It has a great manual transmission, very good clutch, easy to use, great shift action. A little bit of vagueness, but very easy to use, and I would take that over a lot of other shifter problems any day. The other big benefit of this car, though, and to me the biggest benefit, was undoubtedly the way that it handled. I was blown away. I still remember the very first time I drove one of these cars, when it was brand new. I got access to a press car, and I drove one. It blew like this. And I was just shocked then, and I'm still shocked by how wonderfully this car handles. The handling is great. The car stays planted through corners. It feels very well poised and very balanced, but the steering is the real thing that is surprising. It is so precise, and it is such a quick steering ride. The thing about this car that is starting to really excite me is how affordable they're getting. These cars are getting, and this one has 100,000 miles, these cars are now getting down to like the low teens, and like 10, 11, 12 even, and for the money, I just, I struggle to think of like more fun you can have in a car than this and include the practicality and a relatively modern vehicle. You've got heated seats in here, automatic climate control, you've got a navigation system, you know, modern screen for technology, Bluetooth. This car just offers a lot for what it, for the price that it has become. I'm so sad at the loss of Ford cars in this market. Obviously, it was the right business decision with SUVs being so popular, but these cars were selling. They were doing well. They were making money, and it's sad that like the main Ford focus going away was like the reason they had to cancel these cool performance cars. Overall, though, I got to say, this is a great car. It really was. It was a great hot hatchback when it was new. It is still a great hot hatchback now that it's getting older and cheaper. I think society will remember this as a pretty special car. Society will remember this as a special car, especially because Ford's not going to be able to follow this up. And I think nice Focus STs and nice Focus RSs will be appreciated long term. It has all the makings of something that people are going to remember and enjoy forever. And I, I don't know, I love this car. It was the best hot hatchback of its era, and frankly, it hasn't lost much sense. And so that's the Ford Focus ST. Pretty much ever since I started reviewing cars, people have been asking me to review a Focus ST, but I wanted to wait for this exact car, an unmodified one in performance blue from the first year when this car made such an impact on the hot hatchback world. And now you can buy this one on Cars and Bids. Anyway, now it's time to give the Focus ST a Doug's score. Starting with the weekend categories and styling, the Focus ST looks nice. Great for a hot hatchback, and it gets a 6 out of 10. Performance 0-60 is in the low 6 second range, and it gets a 3 out of 10. Handling is surprisingly sharp given this car's age and front wheel drive, and it gets a 6 out of 10. Fun factor is strong. It's a hoot to drive. It's fast. It's sharp. It's cool to toss it around. And it gets a 6 out of 10. Finally, cool factor. And these are too common to be really cool, though they're still at least neat enough. And it gets a 5 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 26 out of 50. Next up are the daily categories and features. The Focus ST is surprisingly well equipped given its age and price point, and it gets a 5 out of 10. Comfort, the ride is fine. The seats are nice. Nothing huge here, but it does well, and it gets a 5 out of 10. Quality is only okay. These have proven reliable, but the interior is mediocre, and it gets a 5 out of 10. Practicality, it's a practical 4-door hatchback with a good cargo space, and it gets a 7 out of 10. Finally, value. And these were great values new, and they're even better now. I can't believe how much thrill and practicality these offer for the price. And it gets an 8 out of 10 for a total daily score of 30 out of 50. Add it up, and the Doug's score is 56 out of 100, which places it here against other relevant hot hatchbacks. The Focus ST obviously doesn't do as well as the new stuff, but it holds its own surprisingly well, scoring closer than I'd expect to the Veloster N and the new Mini GP. More importantly, the ST scores higher than the BRZ and the Fiesta ST, which are closer rivals. I love the Focus ST, and I'm happy I finally have one on my channel.