Tuesday, November 07, 2006

2008 Ford Fiesta

Pictured below is an interpretation of the 2008 Ford Fiesta. This is an important car for European Ford since it will replace a very successful model that doesn’t have a very exciting design but is indeed a very good product. This is typical of recent Euro-Fords. Now, with some excitement added in the design (just check the S-Max and the new Mondeo), Ford of Europe is up for a good fight against the native European brands.

This photoshop of the Fiesta is not new, and it is of course based on the Iosis concept. So it didn’t catch our attention at the time… until some spy-shots of the next Mazda 2 surfaced (photos by Lehman and
presented in Worldcarfans). The small Mazda and the Fiesta are evil twins, sharing most of the underpinnings and being manufactured in the same factory in Spain. But the thing that caught our attention in the Mazda spy-shots was the design of the wheelarches (plus a disturbing resemblance to the Yaris in the back and the fact that it will look gazillion times better than the current Mazda 2). This wheelarch design follows the theme presented in the CX-7 crossover and also previewed is a Mazda 6 CGI. And, most important, they are similar to the wheelarches previewed in the Fiesta CGI. Very interesting, indeed… could this Fiesta prediction be more real than we thought initially? Fact is, it looks too good to be true!

When the 2008 Fiesta arrives it will also bring a more youthfull interior with some interesting developments in the HMI. Expect a menu-based control system for some entertainment devices. And can we expect a multilink suspension? The latest reports don’t suggest that, although it would be very nice if Ford would lead the pack in this class like it did with the Focus back in 1998. 10 years since the introduction of the Focus-I could well be cellebrated by giving a multilink suspension to the Fiesta and being again the absolute leader in handling.
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