So, after a horrendous week, the car recently snapping its door card, and an hours sleep last night, I set off for work this morning.

Outside lane of the motorway, doing a fair lick (it was 70 officer, honest!) and the car stopped responding. Gas pedal down, nothing. The car maintained its revs (probably as it was in drive and just rolling) but no error lights, slowed down, rolled over the inner two lanes (quite fun in rush hour traffic I might add!) with no response, no error lights or anything.

Got to the hard shoulder, rolled along for a mile and nothing, no power, no lights. Car stopped, and the revs then dropped down from 3.5K to stall, and "Power Assist Failure" appeared. Turned the car off, turned it on again and a cautious drive on my way to the office meant I got there without issue.

I looked at the error codes, and there was nothing, so my first thought is a mechanical issue (fuel filter perhaps - given that I had sadly reverted to desperation last week and used sainsbury's fuel - its quite possible!).

So, I think I will have to monitor and see what it could be, however, a search on the forum says that the last person with a similar issue (on a manual) was DPF fluid, but I had Ford confirm I dont have this waste of space in my car, so I presume I am looking at something else mechanical!

Any thoughts from anyone? I am tempted to replace the fuel filter, but given the hassle of this thing, I wouldn't be surprised if replacing the filter would be as easy as operating on myself with a rusty spoon under anesthetic!

if ive read that correctly, the fact that the revs held at 3k rpm seems a bit odd for a fuel filter issue...

sounds more like a pedal issue...but would have thought that would have lit up the dash

odd, but fuel filter would be worth a go for starters

So did you stop the car, or would it have kept going indefinitely?

Did the steering go heavy like the power assisted steering was not working? The warning may just have been related to the fact that the power steering could not get enough (or any) power from the engine so threw an error.

To be honest, at the time the car was slowing down and lost all power, I believe that the holding of the revs was not strictly related to it, the car was still in drive at the time, so the auto brain probably just maintained the revs and then when the car stopped, it stopped sending a signal and so killed off the engine.

To be honest though I could feel no issues with the steering, hence thinking its a red herring. the car probably thought "not sure what to tell you, so I will blame the power steering!" probably forgetting that I have a few more brain cells than it does and could see it was lying to me! :p

haha, phoned Ford and they wanted £80+VAT for the replacement :p

So I hit eurocarparts. The only thing that confuses me a little is that the shapes seem different to that of the example in the Haynes manual.

http://www.eurocarparts.com/ecp/c/Ford_Focus+C-Max_1.6_2005/p/car-parts/car-service-parts/regular-service/fuel-filter/?503590158&1&7f2ea680bc20a8ab2373bccdc8d3db852045dac1&000140

That looks slightly different to the picture, but I assume that it should be alright. can anyone offer any thoughts?

Well, I am now more confident that it is in fact the fuel filter that is the issue.

Driving along, I find that (although there is a bit of wind outside) after about 2.5k revs (not 3.5 as I wrongly stated in the first post!) it feels like I have just driven into a strong headwind, immediately after, it feels like I have started to drive the car with the brakes stuck on. if I take my foot off the gas a fraction (as I do to save fuel economy) after about 5 seconds, the car seems to recover and begins to return to normal driving fashion.

Coupled with the fact that I called Ford who advise that the service in November did not include the fuel filter and that it was not done, as its not due until its next service (100k miler) so I think its probably overdue!

so I need to get myself a priming bulb, a new filter, some time and some patience!

One question I do have, is the best method of filling the fuel filter based on using the priming bulb to gradually fill, or, is it better to buy diesel, store it in a suitable container, and just use a large syringe to inject the fuel into the filter, prior to priming?