The new Ford Focus RS is easily one of this year’s most hotly anticipated cars. Turns out, though, actually getting one into your driveway might be a little harder than you’d expect. One owner says that he’s been waiting to take delivery of his Focus RS for two months now, and now, he has no idea where the car actually is—and Ford’s not saying either.
The missing Focus RS in question will, with any luck, eventually belong to Kevin Flynn. Like many others, Flynn was excited enough about the Focus RS that he placed an order for one last October. When February rolled around, “things started to go wrong,” Flynn wrote in a Medium post:
The factory was shut down for 3 weeks to fix something on all the cars produced to that date, and to change the tooling to prevent whatever issue was plaguing them from happening any more.
The shutdown was reported by this forum post, which attributed the stop to “issue(s) brought to light at the Valencia test drive” where journalists first tested the cars.
It should be noted that production hitches, especially if you’re ordering a product from a brand new launch, aren’t unheard of. Unless you’ve commissioned a custom car that will be built to your exact specifications, customers aren’t privy to round-the-clock updates on the production processes of their cars.
Still though, Flynn wanted answers. He mentioned two alleged anonymous Ford employees on the FocusRS.org forums who claimed to shed some light on the situation in his post. They said that Flynn’s car, despite some production halts, was finished and waiting at a port in Newark, New Jersey to be shipped.
But Flynn then said that Ford found out about the employees, “told them to cease all information exchange,” and then after their forum correspondence went cold. All those posts have since been edited out of existence, perhaps so the posters—whoever they are—could protect themselves from reprisal by their employers.
Flynn wrote that on May 6 he learned that his car had been unloaded and was sitting at the docks, but neither he nor his dealer has heard anything about it since. The same goes for a bunch of other people, it turns out; other members of the same forum have groused about production delays and ambiguous order statuses.
User Jetdocj said he was told that his car was being held at customs, and then that there was a problem that stopped Focus RSs from being released until it was fixed.
After continued correspondence with Ford, Flynn received this email from the automaker’s support team, saying that they were aware of his problem but that he should really be talking to his dealer instead (who is just as clueless on the whereabouts of his car as he is). Then they went ahead and ended the conversation with him.
Huh.
In an email from this morning, Flynn confirmed to me that everything is as it has been for the past two months: the car is still in that almost etheric limbo of being “in transit.”
So, our question now is: where the hell is that Focus RS?
We emailed Ford and got the curt response, “We are looking into this customer’s order status.”
We will update you if we learn more.