After nearly 50 years, the Ford Fiesta is dead, so long live the... wait, which of the current crop of superminis should we go for?
WORDS SAM BURNETT PHOTOGRAPHY OLGUN KORDAL
RIP – after 47 years of ubiquity Ford’s Fiesta has come off sale (cutthroat business this, no room for sentimentality) thanks to barely controlled inflation. Not the economic kind, though that can’t be helping, rather the fact that cars are getting too big. People want high riding SUVs, or more spacious, well appointed hatchbacks. Throw in ever stricter emissions rules and making a supermini at lower volumes is getting too expensive. Can’t blame Ford for deciding it couldn’t be bothered.
The Fiesta was long the default choice – you could recommend it to anyone and they’d be happy. There’s no obvious natural successor, but we’ve brought together the cheap one, the all-rounder and the current UK bestseller (although it was dethroned by the Ford Puma while we were writing this) to see if the crown fits any of the rivals, or whether the Fiesta’s demise marks the end of an era. The cheap one is the £14,795 Dacia Sandero in top spec (as if it makes a difference) Expression trim, showing off its recent facelift courtesy of the budget brand’s nimble lifestyle-oriented pivot. Not the kitesurfing and spelunking that rivals seem to think we get up to at the weekend, but rather tramping about in the woods with the dog while the kids ride their scooters into a tree.
Skoda must be fuming – fewer people saw Dacia’s Soviet-spec output lumbering about Romania in the early Nineties in the same way the likes of the Skoda Favorit haunted middle-sized British towns. But Skodas are right posh now, even if it’s taken a while to pull off – the Fabia’s the fanciest here, but not the most expensive. It’s £19,850 in penultimate Colour Edition spec and we know it’s a great all-
rounder because that’s the award we gave it back in 2022 – it’s become the automatic suggestion of an inoffensively pleasant new car to go for since the Volkswagen Golf was edged off into the rough.
The bestseller, surprisingly, is the Vauxhall Corsa, but then someone has to be in first place, that’s how lists work. The Fiesta’s ignominious toppling from its (very) long-time sales chart domination is the thing here, made all the worse by being at the hands of its archenemy. Supply issues, economic malaise, COVID-19, bad weather – there are all sorts of factors involved in the decline of the UK new car market – and the Corsa’s numbers haven’t dropped as far or as fast as others. At £22,135 it’
