Ford Fiesta axed: UK’s most popular car through the ages

Ford has announced the end of Britain’s most popular car – the Fiesta.

The US carmaker has confirmed it will end production of the UK’s all-time bestselling car next June. Its factory in Cologne, Germany, will switch to producing two new electric models in the “latest symbol of the shift from internal combustion engines to batteries”, said The Guardian.

The Fiesta was developed in response to the 1973 oil crisis, which saw “the price of fuel rocket and motorists needing a more economically efficient car”, said Sky News. Since it was launched in 1976, more than 22 million Fiestas have been sold around the world. Of those, 4.8 million were in the UK, where the Fiesta was the best-selling model for 12 successive years from 2009 to 2020.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A 2013 poll found the Fiesta was the most popular car to have sex in, said The Sun. A Fiesta appeared in 1976 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me with Roger Moore – one of more than 4,000 appearances by the model in films, according to the Internet Movie Cars Database.

The “legendary car touched many lives and it will be missed”, said The Telegraph. “It’s the car in which countless teenagers learned to drive” and has been the “faithful friend of elderly drivers who have relied on it to get around on little more than a state pension” and “pretty well everyone in between”.

Announcing the end of the road for the model on Twitter, Ford said: “It’s time to say goodbye to the little car that has touched us all.”

The first Fiesta model was launched in 1976.

In its peak year, 1987, over 150,000 Fiesta models were sold in the UK.

Produced from 1989-97, generation three of the Fiesta looked very different to previous models.

The fourth generation of Fiesta was Britain’s best-selling car from 1996 to 1998.

Fiesta Mark V was ergonomically and mechanically more advanced than any previous generation.

The sixth generation Fiesta ran from 2008-2019.

Launched in 2017, the seventh generation was larger, roomier, safer and more efficient.