Ford Fiesta automatic vs rivals

Tell a Dalal Street broker to buy a petrol automatic and he’d probably whack your head clean off your shoulders. Not paisa vasool! Spark ignition engines and automatic transmissions are never a compatible match in developing nations. In India cars that used the combination in the lower segments had a very short shelf life. This was, strangely enough, not a problem with more expensive cars, but they were diesels and the more affluent couldn’t be bothered with shifting a stick umpteen times.
For the less affluent the problem has always been efficiency. A petrol automatic car just wasn’t an affordable ownership experience. And yet we have almost every manufacturer in the C-segment offering the same. Honda has the City automatic, Hyundai offers the Verna while Skoda and Volkswagen have the Rapid and the Vento respectively. It’s a fairly crowded space, isn’t it, for a choice of car that almost everyone considers makes little economic sense? And so, why then did even Ford jump into this segment with the automatic Fiesta? Why is this segment getting popular and does it make sense? To find those answers we compared the new Fiesta automatic with the Honda City, still one of the most popular choices in the sedan segment and the Skoda Rapid (which shares everything but its nose with the VW Vento) a car that has rapidly and firmly impressed us with its blend of elegant understated style and strong performance. This is one test where the answers don’t just crop up