Fiestas of all ages celebrating the model’s 40th anniversary at Dagenham in 2016 – Matt Alexander/PA
“Small car, small profits,” growled Henry Ford II when the Ford Fiesta was first mooted in the early Seventies. That in a nutshell is the problem with Britain’s favourite car, the Fiesta; after 46 years its profitability (or the lack of it) will cause its demise next July.
Despite of total combined European sales of 17.8 million (4.8 million in the UK), one rumour doing the rounds earlier this year is that profits had reached such a low, Ford was earning more out of its licensing deals with Lego than it earned from the entire Fiesta operation.
We’ve been predicting the end of the Fiesta for a couple of years now as Ford suffers with overwhelming costs and legacy issues in its European operations, in spite of the 12,000 job losses and European plant rationalisation announced in 2019. Ford has since refused to confirm any continued commitment to the Fiesta and on Thursday it is expected to announce the end of the car, which has provided individual transport for so many, particularly the young, old and impecunious.
Earlier this year the company split its operations into two separate operations: Ford Blue, for traditional internal combustion-engined vehicles; and Ford Model E, for its new electric models – there was never any doubt that the Fiesta sat in the former category, which Wall Street investors felt was a sector with diminishing returns.
Henry Ford II and Ford Fiesta (1976)
Ford’s larger Focus family hatchback, too, is expected to be for the chop, with the company announcing the demise of the current model in 2025, adding that from 2030 it would only produce electric vehicles in Europe.
With yet more tough decisions to make over its European future, Ford will have been influenced in its decision to drop the Fista by the costs of increasingly stringent crash test requirements and the electronic safety equipment required in all cars to pass those tests.
Those demands, together with increasingly stringent emissions regulations, mean all cars are now more expensive to produce and small, cheap cars such as the Fiesta struggle to make money.
Ford isn’t the first to withdraw from the sector and is unlikely to be the last. Only those car makers with alternative low-cost marques, such as Renault’s Dacia brand which produces cars in Morocco and Romania, are planning to continue to produce small combustion-engined cars based on legacy platforms.
Ford Fiesta ST-Line (2021)
The latest tranche of European engine emissions regulations known as Euro 7 has been repeatedly delayed, but is expected to be published this week. They are likely to require even tougher restrictions on emissions of harmful pollutants such as fine particulates, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. With the requirement for exhaust after-treatment systems, exhaust-gas generation and complex filters, together with sophisticated monitoring systems to maintain those emissions standards, Euro 7 will make all combustion-engined cars much more expensive to produce. In the end, Ford has decided its baby Fiesta just isn’t worth the candle.
Sales have been falling for the ageing Fiesta, now in its eighth generation. In spite of a recent facelift, it doesn’t even appear in the UK’s top 10 bestsellers list which it headed for years, with arch-rival Vauxhall’s Corsa heading the table. Ford’s Puma crossover, which is Fiesta-based and built in Romania, is the third best seller behind the Nissan Qashqai and the Corsa.
Car makers have been lobbying against Euro 7, but it appears their voices haven’t been heard. At the Paris motor show last week, Carlos Tavares, boss of the European car making giant Stellantis, said the cost of Euro 7 would be parlous and “we don’t need [it] because it will absorb resources and time which should be going into battery electric vehicles… It is counterproductive as we are reaching the limits of what is physically possible.”
Casting a shadow over Ford’s decision is the EU’s intention to outlaw sales of purely combustion-engined vehicles by 2035 (2030 in the UK), which makes the economics of producing a replacement Fiesta marginal at best. The European and UK parliaments see battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) as the way ahead and the development of a new generation of battery cars is influencing the design and size of future products.
Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson puts a Ford fiesta car through its paces with Navy marines on Instow beach, Devon, UK – Guy Harrop/Alamy
Small battery cars struggle not only with the high cost (and the weight) of a battery pack, but also because the batteries are large and require fitting in the floor to give adequate and safe handling. This means cars are going to get bigger. The original 1976 Ford Fiesta was only 3,565mm long and 1,567mm wide, while the current Mk8 is 4,040mm long and 1,784mm wide; small cars aren’t small any more, but battery-powered small cars would be much larger again.
There’s also the question about the future for Ford’s huge factory in Cologne, Germany, which builds the Fiesta, as it is currently scheduled to produce a new battery-electric Ford based on the Volkswagen MEB chassis platform. Small car models are required to have a long shelf life and be produced at the most efficient and cheap plants. Yet even marginal profitability is dependent on reusing floorpans and components; there simply wouldn’t be time for a new Fiesta to claw back its development costs, let alone make money, before it would have to be axed along with all other solely petrol- and diesel-engined cars.
Previous Ford boss Alan Mulally (2006-14) said that car names on which millions have been spent shouldn’t be lightly discarded – he revived the Taurus name in North America. At the launch of the Fiesta in 1976, that name badge was freely handed over to Ford by General Motors, which had used it on a Fifties Oldsmobile, but those were different times indeed.
Ford is unlikely to relinquish the cherished Fiesta name, but will we see it gracing the back of a car in future? I wouldn’t bet against it, although it’ll be a very different car from the tiny three-door Mk1 model in which my wife and I drove off on our honeymoon many years ago.
Goodbye Fiesta, it’s been a sensible and economical ride…
Keyword: Goodbye to the Ford Fiesta, Britain’s favourite car