Re: Wake me up when it's less boring or does more mpg
My 5 year old 1.6 Focus diesel turbo still averages 53-54mpg, and only costs £30 per year to tax (as it just scraped under the relevant CO2 emission target at the time). From memory it had around 112bhp, but it seems to plenty for my purposes. I think it cost be just under £14K at the time. Yes, there are issues with diesel particulates (although it's got a particulate filter, so I don't know how much that helps).
In all, it's not obvious that much progress has been made in the last 5 years.