[Scott R]

I'm hoping this is isolated to just this one Focus, but I'm finding a lot of unhappy customers on Google. We were given a 01' Ford Focus Zx3 (we own a lot) and I had it parked out back for a few months.

This weekend I started on some of our older projects and this was one of them. It had a nasty hesitation, if you floored it the car would bog and die trying to get into traffic. Dangerous problem really, and no CEL light ever.

I pulled the fuel tank noticing that the fuel pressure was a bit low and found a ton of contamination in the tank. Brown almost like mud in the bottom of the fuel pump housing. When I drained the fuel filter black and brown ooze ran out as well.

After I cleaned all of that up I replaced the pump, sock and filter it ran a lot better. Now I had a missfire on two cylinders, well that was a bad coil pack, and after that the EGR sensor was dead as well.

I replaced all of this and now it runs as it should, but the thing that gets me is this car has only 90K on it and it had a ton of failures, all very well documented on the internet. I would have thought this one car was just a lemon, but it seems that most of these are lemons.

I think I'm going to donate it to the vetrans group locally as I'm afraid to sell it. Anyone else have any experience with these cars? Good or bad?