Will this damn Focus never stop going wrong? First there was the thoroughly annoying reversing light failure fiasco last year resulting in me clipping the garden wall with the back bumper and cracking it because I couldn't see where I was reversing in the dark and now the second thing to break in 12 years has happened.
Popped round to The Gary's workshop a couple of weekends ago to take off the front M&S tyres and fit summer ones on his tyre changer in the hope that the winter weather has finally ended. Couldn't find any decent 205/50/16s at the council tip for the back end so we moved the 50 series Toyo CF1s which had been on the back to the front and fitted a pair of fairly decent tip sourced
205/55/16 Kumhos to the rear. About 4mm tread left on them and online road tests seem to indicate they grip well enough wet or dry which I soon confirmed. Being on the back they won't affect the speedo or the fuel consumption so I really couldn't be arsed about the tiny difference in size. However a couple of days later I was leaving a friend's house and the traction control kicked in at 20 mph and stopped me dead in my tracks until I pressed the centre console button and switched it off. Thought no more about it but then it happened again a day or so later and several times since.Racking my brains I've now twigged it's the traction control system thinking that the bigger tyres on the back are rotating at a different speed to the front tyres and we must be sliding. The difference in radius is a mere 1cm or 3% which is barely more than the difference between brand new and completely bald tyres but it seems to be big enough to occasionally trigger the overly protective skid control system and cut the power completely in case the idiot driving is about to kill himself.
Ok so I suppose this is not actually the car's fault and I can't really call it a failure and even more annoyingly the reversing light having been AWOL for a year has started working again so we're now back down to zero failures in 12 years which is frankly reprehensible and something Ford should be thoroughly ashamed of. How the hell do they expect to make any money from servicing and repairs to plough back into future car development if nothing ever breaks or even worse the things that do break then eventually fix themselves again?
I thought self repairing technology was purely in the realms of sci-fi novels but apparently not. So I suppose I'd better haunt the tip for a while until I find a set of decent 50/16s to match the fronts or some 55/16s to match the rears and until then I'll have to manage by switching the TC button off every time I go out. God it's a hard life.