When Jim Farley led the launch of the Scion line and helped introduce the Toyota Yaris for North America, he looked east from his California office for a response.
"I wondered: What would Detroit do? I saw the Aveo."
Ironically, at about the same time, Toyota was working on its first serious full-size pickup truck, one that would cost the automaker more money than Scion and Yaris and wouldn't sell in the same volume. But with the new Tundra, Toyota's transformation into a full-range automaker -- American-style -- would be complete.
Farley left for Ford Motor Company just as spiking gas prices began contributing to a seismic shift in American automotive tastes. Now this seismic shift looks like more than just a reaction to gasoline prices. There's a credit crisis, too, and we're no longer able to get affordable luxury car leases on the backs of bloated residuals. Out-of-work carpenters and home-improvement handymen can't afford new F-150s. City living is becoming popular, again, and a small car is as likely to become an urban family's only ride as the third or fourth car in a suburban McMansion's garage. Farley is confident that even as oil eases on down below $110 per barrel, small cars are here to stay.
And so Ford will bring its next-generation Fiesta B-segment car here. Tundra wasn't to be Toyota's best-seller, and the Fiesta won't be Ford's biggest-selling small car in the U.S. But it will transform the battling Blue Oval.
"Fiesta is to Ford," Farley says, "what Tundra is to Toyota."
By marketing true "world cars," with small differences between markets around the globe like bumper design, interior trim, and standard and optional equipment, Ford figures it can make money on its two smallest cars to be sold in America: the Fiesta and the next-generation, 2011 Focus. They would sell for about $17,000 and $20,000, respectively, in 2008 U.S. dollars. Ford begins production at the end of the first quarter of '10, in the Cuautitln plant near Mexico City that now builds F-150s to F-550s for the Mexican market. Production of the '11 Focus begins a few months later.
Ford has tried the global thing before, most recently with the first Focus at the end of the last millennium. By the time the U.S. Focus made it to market, Ford had made a mess of its production efficiencies. The marketing department has given the new way of doing things a Bob Marley tune-like name, "One Ford," which means it could build, for example, the Americanized Fiesta in any Fiesta plant in the world.
"Take the five-door hatch, add the Verve-concept rear deck, and you're 90-plus-percent there," says Mays of the U.S.-spec sedan's look. It will employ a conventional trunk, yet maintain a racy roofline and tall rear deck. Its upper grille design will be different from those of the Euro models we drove; our version should be a riff on Ford's current three-chrome-bars look of the Taurus, Edge, and others.
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