Ford Fiesta History
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The new Ford Fiesta is the first subcompact offered by Ford in the U.S. since the last model year of its three-door Aspire in the late 1990s. The Fiesta was launched as a 2011 model, in both four-door sedan and five-door hatchback models, and has been adapted from the well-received and very popular model sold under the same name in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere—though North American versions offer more standard equipment than Fiestas elsewhere in the world.
The new Fiesta competes with the Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Nissan Versa, and Chevrolet Aveo. Its starting price of $13,995 can rise as high as $23,000 if buyers tick lots of boxes on the lavish lists of options offered by both the factory and Ford dealers.
Ford last sold a car called the Fiesta—a subcompact three-door hatchback—in the U.S. from 1978 to 1980, following it with the Festiva three-door (1986-1993) and then the Aspire three-door (1994-1997). The newest iteration for 2011 offers “expressive” and “vibrant” styling inside and out—the theme is “energy in motion”—with a dashboard center stack deliberately reminiscent of a mobile-phone keypad. The driver can choose among several different colors of LED “mood lighting” to illuminate the cup holders, footwells, and so forth.
The new Fiesta, in either body style, comes with just a single engine option: a 1.6-liter four estimated at 119 horsepower. A five-speed manual gearbox is standard, but the automatic option is an unusual and technically advanced six-speed “PowerShift” direct-shift gearbox (DSG), of the sort that’s more usually found in pricey German brands like Audi and Porsche. Ford has committed to class-leading fuel economy in its new models, and the Fiesta—not yet rated by the EPA—is expected do well in that regard, at around 30 mpg city, 40 mpg highway.
Starting more than a year before the car arrived, Ford did more promotion and marketing for the Fiesta than for any other small car it’s launched. During 2009, hundreds of thousands of U.S. buyers first encountered one of 100 Fiestas driven around the country by “agents” of the so-called “Fiesta Movement” who spoke, wrote, blogged, tweeted, and filmed their cars, their journeys, and the people they met—all free promotion for Ford. Fiestas can be hard to miss, mind you, with two of the more vivid color options Lime Squeeze and Bright Magenta. The latter can even be ordered with a startling two-tone white and magenta leather interior.
