For some reason, I thought the one I’d seen by the police station was blue when in fact, it’s silver -a brain fart on my part, evidently. I’m probably on some kind of watch list now for being seen pulling into the police station parking lot to take photos of cars, so I hope you find this sighting of a Solstice GPX coupe worth it.
As discussed yesterday, the Solstice GPX has a supercharged 2.0L 4 cylinder engine with an impressive amount of horsepower per cubic inch of displacement. Today’s featured car also has a 2.0L 4 cylinder under its hood. It’s not quite the little terror on wheels that the Solstice GPX is, but I wouldn't have any qualms about driving it, anyway. I present to you, a 2004 Ford Focus SVT that I spotted at a Ford dealership the other week.
I’ll try not to go off on a tangent here, but longtime readers may recall a post where I gushed over the brand new Focus ST with its 252 HP turbocharged 2.0L 4 cylinder, 6 speed manual transmission, and racing seats that had an MSRP of $27,000, wherein I was briefly distracted talking about how much German tourists love lift trucks (somewhat street legal monster trucks, and Oh, yes, German tourists do love them!) and stalled out said Focus ST while driving it. They may also recall a post that was supposed to be about a Mercedes C230 Kompressor that had me digressing to include a Saleen n2o (Saleen’s nitrous-infused, 225 HP version of the Focus). Well, if you don’t have the moo-lah to pony up for a brand new Focus ST, and you don’t have the time to track down the rare Saleen n2o Focus, but you want a hot hatch Ford, the Focus SVT is your car…. Just not this one -it’s overpriced at $9,788.
Here is a new Focus ST from the car show for you to see.
Back to the car at hand...
Today’s Focus SVT is a 2004 model (nearly 10 years old) with 94,000 miles on its odometer. The asking price of nearly $10,000 is, in my opinion, unrealistic, considering the dealership probably owns it for between $3,500-$4,500 -unless they had to give way too much trade in allowance on it to make the deal work out for whatever this was traded in for. Still, like the overpriced base model Solstice roadster from yesterday, that’s not the buyer’s problem until they end up overpaying for the darn thing. A more realistic price on this Focus SVT with this kind of mileage would be around $6,500 or so to start, and even then I’d recommend haggling it down a bit.
I’m pretty sure I've written previously about Ford’s Special Vehicle Team (SVT), probably in a post I wrote about the Ford Contour now that I think about it. Anyway, the SVT is a great program for squeezing performance out of the Ford lineup of vehicles. In 2004, they put the squeeze on the Focus. A stock 2004 Ford Focus ZX3 (the designation for the 2 door hatchback) featured a 2.0L 4 cylinder that produced 130HP. That was plenty for propelling a little car like that around. But where’s the fun in putt-putting around unless you can tear up the roadway, and rack up a few speeding tickets while you’re at it? Am I right? With that goal in mind, the SVT enhanced the little car’s handling with improved independent front and rear suspensions that included MacPherson struts and a 22mm stabilizer bar in front, and a 21mm stabilizer bar in back. They tuned up that 2.0L to make 170 HP, and, realizing that eventually every driver would need to slow down, enhanced the braking system with the addition of discs all around instead of just at the front. They also replaced the stock front discs with vented disc brakes to dissipate more heat and cut back on brake fading. For 2004, this was an impressive little set up. There’s no turbo charging or Nitrous boost like in the ST or the Saleen n2o, but in a little hatch like this, you can find plenty of trouble to get into with 170 HP.
The current US market doesn't even have a 2 door hatchback version of the Focus available (though you can get them in Europe), so we’re not totally comparing apples to apples here because those extra doors on the new Focus ST do cost money that needs to be factored into the MSRP.
So, we already know that a new ST carries a sticker price of around $27,000 for a loaded up model like the one I drove, but the bottom line starting MSRP is $24,115, according to Ford’s website. In 2004, the SVT Focus ZX3 had a base price of just a hair under $18,000. That evens out to be a $679.44 increase for each of the 9 years between the 2004 performance Focus offering and the present day’s performance Focus. Factor out maybe $100 from each of those steps to account for the difference between a 2 door + hatch ZX3 and the 4 door ST, and we’re still at $579.44. In other words, the cost of a performance-tuned Focus has gone up by about a third since 2004. Of course, one could also say that the price of a Focus SVT has gone down by 46% since it was new if we’re going based on the inflated asking price of this used one. Better yet if we go with a more realistic asking price of $6,500, which would mean the price dropped by about 64%. Nice when we can make depreciation work to our advantage, eh?
Clearly, performance Focii (is that right? I never know if it‘s appropriate to pluralize a car name like that, nor am I sure that‘s even the correct pluralization of the word Focus -oh well.) don’t hold onto their resale value the way that a Solstice GPX, and certainly the GPX coupe do. This is due in large part to the fact that there are plenty to be had, and Ford is still making them. Besides, the rule of thumb with cars that have the potential to be classics or collectible is this: the more impractical a car’s design is in terms of accommodating passengers and their stuff, the more valuable it tends to get as time wears on (you may have noticed that the coupe and convertible versions of older cars tend to be the ones that collectors seek out and pay top dollar for). The Solstice can seat two, and the Solstice Coupe can seat 2 but lacks storage space for its own removable hard top panel, making it the picture of impracticality. A Focus -even the ZX3, can seat 4 adults (5 if you really pack ’em into the back seat) and have room for hauling around your luggage. Funny how that works out, don’t you think?
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