The sum of all parts is greater than the whole

That's how I feel about the new Ford Focus. Every time I see one on the road I wonder what happened to it. I actually used to drive a 2002 Ford Focus ZX3. That's the 3 door hatchback. It looked like an egg. It had lots of details that drove me nuts as a designer. The new Focus has a lot of details that are well crafted. So why does it look so offensive? The past few years, the Focus has fallen completely out of my cardar. That's my car radar. You heard it here first. Anyways, what I am saying is that it was so bland and boring the past few years that I couldn't draw one during a game of Pictionary Car Edition. Now, this Focus has certainly caught my eye, like a train wreck, cheetah print, or a girl with a muffin top that for some reason, you just can't look away from no matter how much it pains you to keep looking. No one else has that problem?

Get on with it!


I'll comment on the things I like about this car. I'll start at the front.

1. I like how the headlights integrate well with the grill. I don't like the headlights or the grill, but I like the way they integrate with each other. I like how the fog lights follow that hard line down around the front of the car.

2. I like the body work as it relates to the fake air vent. The top of the cutout connects the front and the rear of the car well. I don't like the "chrome" piece that fills it. It stops too abruptly at the door line. It feels like they forced the piece into too small of an area.

3. I like the dash board. I don't know how much you'll like that brushed aluminum finish when it's reflecting the sun in your eyes, but from a purely aesthetic point of view, I like how it frames everything. The controls look very balanced. Even the steering wheel looks integrated well from the angle the picture was taken from.

4. The back end... Well I don't like anything about the back end. Except maybe the blinking third brake light that my wife pointed out to me.

So as a whole, the car somehow fails. It's too tall, the wheels look too small, the tail lights are too small for such a big back end, and the grill is a weak interpretation of Ford's new beefy horizontal grill treatment that seems to work great on all of it's other cars. Overall, the car just has weird proportions that keep it from looking sporty, sophisticated, bland, or cute. But I'll keep looking at it when I pass one on the road, not understanding what captures my attention. The beauty is in the details if you can make yourself stare long enough to see them.