Ford Fiesta 1.6 Metal review

by David Finlay (19 December 2011)

Shortly after I parked the Ford Fiesta Metal outside my mother's house, a concerned neighbour came round to tell me that the tyres were flat. Actually, they had the right amount of air in them. What had confused the interfering old busybody (the neighbour, not my mother) was that they were very low-profile, and yes, from two storeys up, if you were looking for an excuse to poke your nose into someone else's business, they might have looked a bit flat.

Those tyres are part of a package which make the Metal look significantly different from most other Fiestas. Other contibutory items include 17" Panther Black five-spoke alloy wheels, side skirts, a tailgate spoiler, lowered suspension, twin exhaust tailpipes and - in the case of the test car - the £470 option of Midnight Sky metallic paint.

Not visible from the outside are the alloy pedals or the uprating of the 1.6-litre petrol engine from its usual 118bhp to a more robust 132bhp. This makes it, at least for now, the most powerful unit in the range by some margin (the second most powerful being the same thing in its unmodified form), and gives the Metal a range-leading 0-62mph time of 8.7 seconds - not blindingly fast by any means, but reasonably perky.

You do have to rev the engine quite hard to get much out of it, and that's not great because the fuel economy is nothing to brag about at the best of times. The official figure is 47.9mpg but I could only just get within 10mpg of that, even during a test in which spirited motoring was frequently out of the question because of icy road conditions. (The close-ratio five-speed gearbox, which keeps the revs above 3000rpm at 70mph in top, doesn't help economy either.) Still, this demonstrated that even without pushing hard you can enjoy the sound of the exhaust note, which is a good deal sportier than in other Fiestas.

So the Metal definitely looks the part, and to some extent goes and sounds it. You might be interested in investing in what remains of the original 1000-strong production run if you wanted something with the general appearance of a junior hot hatch.

On the other hand, nobody who knows what a junior hot hatch really is will give the Metal a second thought. Those tyres are very grippy, and react quickly to steering inputs, but the suspension, which feels hardly any more sports-oriented than it does on a standard Fiesta, can't keep up with them.

The Metal is therefore not nearly as much fun as it looks like it's going to be on corners, and on damp and not ideally surfaced roads even a brisk overtaking manoeuvre can be surprisingly troublesome as you wonder exactly which was the car wants to go.

If you like the style and aren't much interested in driving, this is fair enough. For me, though, the Metal . . . let's see, what cliché would work here . . . oh, yes . . . for me, the Metal writes a cheque that it can't cash. It simply isn't the car it says it is.

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