2001 Ford Fiesta review from UK and Ireland

The car has never given any trouble due to low miles from old person that had it before. It seems to have only been driven to church.

The car looks a little stupid looking and too girly. The car does have a good amount of room inside it. Despite a small car, you can fit just about most things in it. The boot is not too bad either.

The ride is typical of a small car of this type, and the gearbox is so awful; it feels as vague as driving blind. You never seem to know if you put the car into gear, until you realize you didn't and the car is now slowing down.

Which ever way the pedals were designed, the accelerator only seems to move about 1mm; whether this was simply to accurately represent the performance of this motor I can only assume. The rev counter is also absent, so you instead of knowing what rpm you are doing, you are given the joys of a white traced car where green arrows flash to show if you are indicating; much more useful I think.

The engine seems to be based on a under powered lawn motor engine. There is no horsepower at any point in the rev band. Simply going through the rev band rewards you as the car gives less and less. At about 5500 rpm the downward rev graph would read about 3 bhp. One could argue well less performance will equal better mpg! Wrong, one would assume that this car could easy see a 45plus mpg, but since the engine needs to be worked so hard it seems to drink fuel. Motorway driving is simply pointless; any attempts to overtake a lorry will leave you for 13 minutes in the overtaking lane going backwards.

The brakes I find really poor. I am used to more expensive cars, and thus I think this is why I found the brakes so poor. I took the car into the garage explaining the car would not stop. He checked through this fault too, then a few hours later explain there was in-fact no fault. I then changed my driving style to start braking about 6 miles before the on-coming round-about.

Kit for this car is fairly basic. But has airbags; a big plus when you can't stop for that Passat in-front which braked.

Overall the car has a quite useful space. With airbags as standard it seems up to date.

It is a low insurance group, which I can't understand, since they have no brakes. It has not fallen apart like the previous model. But it suffers a stupid cute looking smiley face, which lacks the aggressive look of the previous model.