Has Ford canned the Focus RS?

Friday, 17 April 2020

Ford has apparently confirmed to a French website that it has canned development of a new Focus RS, because it couldn't make the numbers add up.

Caradisiac has reported that the fourth generation of the Focus 'will not be entitled to an overpowered RS version' due to both emissions regulations and money.

The European requirement for car manufacturers to get their fleet-wide average CO2 figures down to 95g/km by 2021 or face big fines already made a powerful hyper hatch a big ask, but Ford's drastic cost cutting across the board - even before the coronavirus pandemic kicked in - with billions of dollars of savings targeted via job losses, factory closures and joint ventures, will have made it even harder to justify a high-cost, low-return project like the RS.

If the French report is true, then the Focus RS is no more.

Ford had set the bar very high with the last RS, with its 2.3-litre turbo-petrol four pumping out an impressive 257kW of power and 440Nm of torque, so talk was of the next iteration heading down the hybrid route to boost power north of 300kW.

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Originally, it was thought the new RS would get a 48-volt mild hybrid system to increase performance and lower emissions, but the focus (sorry) soon turned to a more radical plug-in hybrid solution to boost power while keeping emissions in check.

Ford's engineers were said to be adapting the PHEV powertrain found in the forthcoming plug-in Escape - a 2.5-litre inline-four Atkinson-cycle engine paired to an electric motor to produce 165kW of power - by beefing up the electric motor and strapping a turbo on.

But now, if the report from Caradisiac is to be believed, either the cost proved too high, the emission reductions too low, or more likely, both simply added up to make a new RS impossible for Ford to justify.

Let's hope it's not true, but it does sound likely.

Still, at least we can console ourselves with the upcoming Focus ST that uses a 206kW/420Nm version of the RS's 2.3-litre engine (and that tuning company Mountune has already wound up to 234kW/515Nm) and the utterly brilliant 147kW/290Nm manual-only Fiesta ST that is already on our shores.