New car

Just before Christmas 2010 my 206 gave up the ghost. Having had it for 18 months and no end of problems in that time I was actually quite relieved to see it get carted away on the back of the scrapman's truck.

A couple of days of 2 hours commutes (each way) to work on the train and I had confirmed my feeling that public transport wasn't going to work. So with a loan to clear what was left of the 206 finance and to find another car the search began.

I ended up with a 1.8 diesel Focus Ghia (2003) with 57k miles on the clock. Last couple of cars have been small engined (1.3/1.4) petrols so thought I'd see if a diesel lump would put up with the 20k miles a year I do and hopefully provide better fuel economy.

My first tank returned 45mpg. A little better than the 1.4 petrol 206 (40-43mpg average) but not enough to offset the added cost of diesel fuel over petrol. Of course that tank included me getting used to car and playing with the much improved acceleration over the small petrols.

Refilled the tank and with the help of the trip computer I'm doing everything I can to keep the reported mpg up. 65-70mph on motorway feels sooo slow!