Ford Fiesta 1.4 TDCi (2009) CAR review

You’re going to see an awful lot of the new Ford Fiesta pretty soon. It’s bound to take its traditional place near the top of the British sales charts, and it deserves to do so far more than ever before. But though there’ll be plenty around, I’d wager three-quarters of them will be petrol-powered – the smaller you go, the less economics work in favour of diesel.

Why? Because the increase in purchase price is a greater proportion of the car’s overall value, and small cars tend to have lower annual mileages, so it takes longer for the improvement in fuel economy to outweigh the higher purchase price.

Nonetheless, a quarter of a massive sales volume is worth having, so Ford offers two diesel engines for the Fiesta: an 89bhp 1.6 16v, or the 67bhp 1.4 8v, tested here in best-selling Zetec trim, which sells for a sky-scraping £12,595 for the five-door.

Hmm, £12,595 for a Fiesta! Better be good...

The Fiesta offers plenty of virtues, which add up to a class-leading drive. So yes, it is good. Nearly-£13k good? Well, I have some reservations about that.

And they all concern the engine. It’s not bad, and delivers some excellent stats, headlines of which are 67.2mpg and 110g/km, but you pay for its parsimony with some distinctly ordinary performance figures. These days, 101mph flat-out and 14.9sec for the 0-62mph scramble fail to impress, especially at this price.

And that engine likes to remind the driver of its diesel nature. It’s rumbly when cold, rumbustious under acceleration, and drones with a rattly overtone around town on a light-to-medium throttle. It fails to deliver that low-rev turbodiesel shove we’ve all got used to, instead metering out just enough pace that it never actually feels slow. The Fiesta deserves a bit of zing, and the 1.4 petrol provides it – the diesel doesn’t.

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