Fiesta on the News

28 months is what it took for the car of the masses to reach the magical figure of one million. The master of design and performance that it is, it has been the best selling car for two consecutive years in a row in Europe ever since its launch in October 2008. Adding more to the pluses is the intense research and numerous crash testing efforts that the company’s safety engineers have undertaken in order to make sure that the car is safe globally. Wait, there’s more! The award winning c-segment sedan has achieved the top rankings in the crash test ratings in Europe, US and China. The car sure is safe and so is the future of Ford in India with an asset like Fiesta on their hands.

The stylish car also threw down the Focus to take the top notch. With sales figures showing almost 2.4 lakh, nearly one fourth of the European sales take place in UK. The only question is, can it do equally well in India? Well, that is one question only time will be able to answer.

From my outlook, Ford India couldn’t lay a safer bet than to bring one of its best cars to the country when the 100 year old company knows that its former model had already made a mark on the sales chart here.

The latest version of Ford’s Fiesta has already clocked up a million sales in Europe, despite only going on sale in October 2008.

UK buyers are the largest contributor to this figure, accounting for a quarter of all sales worldwide. British customers have snapped up 239,742 examples of the supermini.

According to Ford’s stats on the Fiesta sales, the most popular option appears to be a high-spec, five door, petrol powered, manual car in Panther Black with the voice control, USB and Bluetooth option added.

The Econetic model is gaining in popularity, but still makes up a small percentage of overall sales. It accounted for just six percent of sales in 2010, although this is an improvement on 2009’s two percent.

Since its launch in 1976, the Fiesta has clocked up a staggering 14m sales in Europe over six generations. The importance of the European market to Ford's current Fiesta sales is evident in the reported global total of 1,140,000 - which means only 140,000 cars were sold beyond the continent.