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I’m not going to start this column by talking about the Ford Fiesta and adding my little voice to the hum of eulogies we’ve all been going through lately.
So, I’ll talk briefly about another Ford.
A nice guy dropped off a Mustang Mach-E for me this week. This is the GT model so it has twin electric motors, four-wheel drive, big red Brembo brake callipers and a paltry 480bhp.
And when everything is set, ‘Untamed’ mode selected and your spleen braced, this rather large crossover/SUV can cover 0-60mph at the same time as a Porsche 911 Carrera S.
I just drove a few miles to Waitrose and back as well as to the hall in the next village for a rehearsal of a play I’m appearing in, and so far the GT seems to be fixing some of the complaints. I have a regular Mach-E.
Why you need a family car that can accelerate to the national speed limit in 3.7 seconds, however, is beyond me, but that’s a discussion for another day.
The ‘Mustang’ and ‘GT’ names are interesting here, because let’s face it, there’s nothing remotely Mustang-ish about the Mach-E.
And frankly, it’s impossible to make an electric 2.2-tonne SUV look like a 5.0-liter V8 muscle car, but Ford still named its first custom EV after arguably its most famous car.
When it comes to car names, nobody has a better back catalog than the Blue Oval.
The Thunderbird, Capri, Escort, Sierra, Ka, Falcon, Cortina, Zephyr and Zodiac have been part of many people’s motoring experiences for decades.
And then, of course, there’s Fiesta.
I won’t say the cliched line ‘everyone’s been in a Fiesta at some point in their life’, but like the Mini, Beetle and Defender, it’s a name that really
means something.
It hurts to get rid of the Fiesta name. Slap a Fiesta badge on the back of a new small electric car always seemed like the natural thing for Ford to do, but it’s not going to happen.
Why? Perhaps because the Fiesta represents Ford’s comfortable, familiar, dealer-on-every-street-corner shape, while the electric age offers an opportunity for reinvention.
If the BBC is known as ‘Auntie’, Fiesta is your nan.
Ford has a history of wiping the slate clean, of course.
The Sierra debuted with a new, broad-shouldered vision in the 1980s, while the razor-edged Focus made the Escort look as different as steak and kidney pudding. The ‘Mustang’ gets another chance because, well, it’s cool.
Like all other legacy carmakers, Ford is deep in the throes of the painful transition to mass electrification.
The current period of change is arguably the greatest since the dawn of the motorcar, and is accompanied by difficult decisions.
The death of the Fiesta name is bad enough, but the bigger point is the impending death of the type of car to which it is attached.
Let’s face it, most people don’t need a car bigger than a Fiesta and yet they are encouraged – and more recently forced – into bigger cars.
A growing group of people are being pushed away from the small, economical and affordable superminis, and therefore priced out of the market.
It’s a scandal that a cheap petrol car is being put to sleep while a like-for-like electric version for the same price is a few years away.
The fading away of well-loved names will inevitably continue.
Ford’s electric car alliance partner Volkswagen is, amusingly, suffering from the same problem with its ID range of EVs, and it’s only a matter of time before the ‘Golf’ and ‘Polo’ names die forever.
But I think this electric reinvention and removal of familiar things risks losing customers’ loyalties.
Names come and go, but so do consumer loyalties in an oh-so-similar EV world.
This column appears in the current edition of Car Dealer – issue 177 – with news, views, reviews, interviews and much more! You can read and download it for FREE by clicking here!
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