David Alvarez
Madrid, (EFE).- The Ford Fiesta car model will stop being manufactured this July after more than 47 years and eight generations, which until 2012 was manufactured in Almusafes (Valencia), leaving 22 million worldwide sales of which Millions had Spanish “blood”.
The model was only manufactured in the German city of Cologne, where Ford’s main headquarters in Europe is currently located, but in its day it was also made in the British factory in Dagenham and in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, China and India.
The Fiesta will be replaced by the Ford Puma model, which already in the first half of 2021 exceeded Fiesta sales by 20,000 in the face of the fever that SUVs have aroused, thus displacing what until then had been the company’s leading model in Europe and which already in 2022 saw its sales reduced by 47%, according to Jato Dynamics.
The Fiesta was born in a context marked by the oil crisis of 1973, which forced, for the first time, to begin to consider cars that had lower fuel consumption and were more compact, but without renouncing new technologies.
In fact, it was the fastest Ford compact urban in the company’s history with its ST line, which at the time was 20% faster and more sustainable, a characteristic that was a hallmark of the car coinciding with the financial crisis of the 2008 in its sixth generation.
A cheap and pointer car
The Ford model, which sold 1 million units in its first three years of life, was in 1983 the first small vehicle to introduce a diesel engine, and in 1989 it was the first passenger car to include the ABS anti-brake system and the driver airbag, as well as other advancements such as power steering.
In the Valencian factory of Almusafes, which was designed to manufacture the Fiesta, and in the rest of Spain the car will continue to resound thanks to songs like “Sufre Mamón”, by Hombres G, and “Car Song” by the British group Elástica that belonged to an entire generation and those to come, just like the Fiesta.
The first Fiesta for sale in Spain went on the market from 125,000 pesetas, which at the current exchange rate is about 750 euros, compared to just over 21,000 euros from which the last car to be manufactured will be marketed.
After nine generations, the brand said goodbye to the old Fiesta, who in his welcome slogan was baptized as the “born strong” and who is now dismissed with a “happy dreams” in a video on his website and social networks in which You can see the different generations that have lived with the car and are already looking to the future with an electric parked in the garage.
Bet on the electric vehicle
The commitment to the electric car is Ford’s new strategy in the race for this type of vehicle, which is beginning to face its second and third generation at the gates of the end of combustion cars in the old continent by 2035.
Next year Ford will present new electric vehicles in Europe – three passenger and four commercial – and two years later it hopes to exceed 600,000 units sold in electric models in the region, in a strategy to reduce the models it brings to the market and, thereby lowering part of the production costs.
From 2030, Ford wants to sell only electric cars in Europe and will abandon the commercialization of combustion engine vans in 2035. By then, all its models that came to have a hybrid option such as the Fiesta will have disappeared.
The American multinational intends that the Puma, the replacement for the Ford Fiesta, begin to be manufactured in its electric version in 2024, thus joining 100% electric models such as the Explorer, a commitment to electrification that will go hand in hand with a completely new center for its production in Cologne.