[greenfoam]

Hey guys although I don't post much anywhere these days. I promised myself when the Fiesta reached 90,000ks I'd give you an update how how it went since I'm doing more Km's than most/all of you and had one of the very first sold.

It's a manual petrol Zetec for those that don't remember. It's now on it's 3rd set of Hancook tyres and at 90,000ks. Zero problems with the car mechanically so far. Long term (since new) average speed is 69km/h and the fuel consumption is between 5.0 and 5.6 depending on the quality of the road,. Usually 5.5 or 5.6 in my area. On one of the early tunes it was doing under 5.0 quite often but the later update tunes don't seem to be as agressive as that one was :(. I think they have detuned them a bit for all the people that were pinging along on 91 octane.

Once or twice in those 90,000ks it's failed to start first attempt (don't know why) but did start second go both times.

It's stood up to some fairly rough road conditions, I've hit a blown off tread from a truck (blew off the truck as it was going past so I didn't even see it before it hit), had huge amount of stones throw at the car and even had about a shovel full of stone screening fall straight off the side of a on coming truck and shower the entire car with stones on the highway. So as you can imagine the window and front end of the car have uncountable amounts of little stone chips. But that's life in the bush. The bumper has a few small cuts in it from the truck tyre I hit in the middle of the night in QLD but otherwise undamaged which was amazing since that was a fair solid impact.

The worst thing is I'm currently driving with a bent 16 inch alloy rim, not sure when that happened but it would have been a pot hole at some stage, although I haven't hit one that I felt was bad enough to damage a good rim so they must be fairly weak. The tyre guy showed it to me on the balancer and it's fairly badly bent so I do need one new wheel, hopefully they don't cost too much.

The gearbox seems to get into reverse much better with some age on it and that's about it :!) Overall we've been really impressed with the car, the amount of times I had it pulling insane amount of sideways load on the car down the highway to avoid obstacles and animals woud be in the dozens and I haven't stacked it yet. Most larger cars I would have stuck in a tree under the same conditions.

That area near the back wheel that cops all the stones off the road essentially has no paint left on it but hasn't rusted at all so that's something :p (this was patched up on the newer ones with a clear plastic thing stuck over that area) so I think only a problem with the early cars. I haven't hassled the dealer over that since it's not much point now that the rest of the car has taken so many stones and is past the point of being stressed about new car damage