New Ford Fiesta – Autoblog loves it!

I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked that Autoblog – perhaps the most influential car blog there is – loves the new Ford Fiesta, after getting their hands on a Euro spec version for testing in the US. After all, they know cars; love cars and probably have a more Euro-centric view of cars than the average American car driver.

But Ford are going to love the positive review which, to be honest, concurrs pretty much with our own views. It looks good, handles really well and feels a lot quicker than the headline figures suggest. But you can tell they usually drive bigger cars. One of their gripes is my favourite gripe on small cars – no arm rest in the middle. After decades driving big BMWs, big Mercs and nows a Cayenne, I always feel like my left arm is floating in thin air when I drive a small car. So Ford, if you fix that for a nation used to big cars, please fix it for the UK too.

But that small gripe apart, they found precious little to complain about. Perhaps the noise on the motorway (sorry, freeway), but that’s a small price to pay for the economy and fun, and something you soon get used to. And, just like us when we had the Fiesta recently, they found an excuse to do more miles than they needed (we did over 500 miles in ours). And we weren’t even testing a big spec version – ours was a review of the Fiesta ECOnetic!

Let’s hope Autoblog’s positive views, and the big PR exercise Ford is currently undertaking in the US with the Fiesta, turns American motorists on to smaller cars. The point is going to come where the US Government (and very possibly this US Government) decides that taxing fuel the way we do in Europe is the way forward. And if you thought the rush to more economical cars was lemming-like in the States when gas prices shot up to nearly $4 a gallon, what on earth will be the reaction when they’re $8?

Check out Autoblog’s review of the Ford Fiesta.