Auto makers rarely want to talk about upcoming vehicles before their marketing hype machines get geared up for them a year or less before they launch.
"We don't talk about future product" is the official mantra heard so often it makes even mild-mannered auto writers ready to throw their unaerodynamic Macs. The whole automotive hype machine that surrounds every new vehicle launched revolves around discussing future product, just usually ones with an imminent sales future.
Yet Ford is taking an aggressive stance with its upcoming subcompact car, the Fiesta, which appeared at the most recent Detroit and Frankfurt motor shows as the Verve concept. Ford confirmed in Detroit that a product based on the Verve will be on sale in 2010, and announced more recently that the small car to be sold in North America will also be called the Fiesta, as it is in Europe.
Perhaps one reason is to erase the public's memory of the company's most recent subcompact offering here, the Ford Aspire, which flamed out of the market three years after being introduced in 1994, even though the squarish Festiva hatchback that it was closely based on was reasonably popular when it was introduced in 1988.
"We didn't connect with the customer," is how current Ford small car manager Beth Donovan diplomatically put it when mentioning the Aspire at a small background session on the Verve in Detroit.
Another reason to start priming the market early on the Fiesta, which is based on the same platform as the Mazda2 hatchback available in most other major markets, is that Ford foresees major growth in the small-car segments.
"Over half of the global growth in car sales in the next five years will be in B- and C- class cars (subcompacts and compacts)," said George Pipas, a Ford U.S. sales analyst who says that these classes combined are larger than any other segment right now, including mid-size pickups. In Canada, these two segments are proportionately much more popular, and easily make up more than 50 per cent of the new-vehicle market. "Plus there are lots of first-time buyers with these cars, which give it extra importance."
To make sure the Fiesta does connect with this already sizable and growing group of buyers, Ford is pouring major resources into studying millennials, or Generation Y — children and teens born between 1980 and 1995. There are expected to be 70 million millennials in the United States by 2010.
With a lineup that went very heavy on trucks in the 1990s, the company has felt the sales pinch of increasing gas prices as much as any other manufacturer, says Kelly Krulikowski, a market research manager on the Verve/Fiesta project.
So what's special about millennials? "They get older sooner, there's lots of sex and violence in their media, while their nurturing parents tend to make it easy to move back home, and also gives [the millennials] more disposable income," said Krulikowski about some of the common characteristics of this generation. "They communicate globally regularly, so they want globally cutting-edge technology that works everywhere."
This may be why Ford not only unveiled the Verve sedan in Detroit, but also showed the hatchback version from Frankfurt, even though Ford executives insisted that only the sedan body style will be offered in North America.
Recent reports have suggested the decision to display the hatchback Verve alongside the world premiere of its sedan stablemate was insisted upon by new Ford marketing chief Jim Farley, who favours the idea of selling the hatch, as well. Farley made a name for himself by successfully launching the small-car-only Scion brand for Toyota in the United States; and so far online polls of which version buyers like more suggest his finger on the pulse of emerging consumer tastes may still be strong.
Yet even the sedan version of the car looks like a hatchback, a purposeful decision on the part of Moray Callum's design team. "Good design sells itself," said Callum. "And this car does that."
