Ford's Fiesta gets 'boosted

Downsizing. Whatever you think of it, it’s happening in a car near you. W12s have been replaced by V8 biturbos, V8s usurped by straight-sixes, and four-pots kicked into touch by three-cylinder motors. 

The latter aren’t anything new in cars; smart has been using them for years.  But Ford’s new one-litre, three-cylinder Ecoboost engine has really captured the imaginations of the motoring press and car buyers alike.

The three-cylinder unit looks tiny, even in the Fiesta's bay.

I spent a day with the white Ford Fiesta you see here, complete with Americanised and really rather hideous facelifted grille, as my own MkII Focus was undergoing testing for a water leak. That’s another story altogether, but this misfortune gave me the chance to try one of the cars of the moment.

The best thing about the 79bhp Ecoboost engine is the noise. At full throttle, it’s like listening to a Porsche’s straight-six several rooms away, but with a more bubbly back beat. Unlike the Fiesta’s old 1.25 and 1.4 engines with four-cylinders, there is much ear candy to gain from letting the Ecoboost motor spin up to the redline. It really is quite magnificent, and kids you into thinking you’re going faster than you really are.

The Fiesta’s Ecoboost engine is also super frugal. An A-road cruise in light traffic delivered just over 50mpg, far worse traffic only cutting that by 10mpg. And a faster run down the A2 at around 50mph saw the UK’s biggest selling car breach the 60mpg barrier. You’d be happy with that in a diesel powered car, and again, I never got near that in my old 1.4 Fester.

The Fiesta's cabin is generally OK, but can't dampen the three-pot's tune.

The only gripe I have with Ford’s new wonderchild relates to its refinement. Granted my courtesy car had only covered 750 miles and it’s running-in period will have been almost non existent.  But I really expected better. It’s noisy on start-up and jiggles your seat at idle. And my test car’s engine gave off a very strange reverberation at 2,500rpm on the overrun.  

But still, general impressions were very positive indeed.

Downsizing? It’s not all bad.

A Crushing Future?

Even Ford's new, entry-level petrol engine contains sophisticated tech.

Tri-turbo diesel engines, suspension that ‘sees’ the road through cameras and adapts itself accordingly; engine start-stop technology that calls into action a starter motor eight times stronger than a normal one, and automatic transmissions with no less than eight forward gears.

They are all incredibly impressive and would blow the minds of car engineers from 50 years ago. But what if something goes wrong? A used VW Golf with a dual-clutch gearbox might set you back 10 grand, but if its transmission gives up the ghost you are looking at over 75 percent of the car’s value to replace it.

Nowadays, every diesel engine has a turbo and now petrol motors are getting in on the act. Ford’s one-litre, three-cylinder Ecoboost motor packs a turbo, which as well as mighty fine efficiency figures, grants enough performance to make not just the old, naturally aspirated, 1.6-litre engine redundant, but the 1.8 as well. It is expected to sell by the bucket load, but how many of those thousands and thousands of buyers know what it’ll cost to fix a blower if it fails?

Technology in cars is good, infectious even; once a car maker breaks new ground, the rest soon follow. Yet at the same time, technology brings complications, expensive complications. And what really frightens me is that such complex kit is now found on new, everyday metal – the stuff I might want to buy used in three to four years time.

After say 40,000 miles, can I really trust a sexy, swift acting DCT to not eat itself, or a turbocharged (and thus more stressed) four-pot to not start guzzling oil or blowing steam through a gasket?

I feel we are on the brink of something big, driven by as much as anything, Western emissions legislation, which continues to put pressure on car manufacturers to produce ever more high tech vehicles to meet CO2 and NOx targets. Ultimately, the buyer will pay the biggest price when something immensely complex like a tri-turbo engine, start-stop system or eight-speed gearbox goes wrong. And they will because no car is 100 percent reliable.

We could become a throw-away society, moving from sophisticated new car to sophisticated new car after our three-year contract is up. And on the face of it, that would be good because we’d all be driving factory fresh vehicles built by companies with increasingly strong new car sales figures – endowing them with more capital to invest into R and D, to make even more brain scramblingly brilliant products...

The downside, though, would be a faltering and eventually imploding used car market; nobody is going to buy someone else’s potentially ruinous problem. A decade old, MK1 Ford Focus is relatively straightforward, mechanically, and thus hardly a frightening used buy today. But the current MK3 in 10 years time? The only way is up as far as bills are concerned, a theme that has already begun and I can only see getting worse as the years progress.