Ford short-changed on Fiesta supply

Marin Burela holds high hopes for the wunderkind of the Ford range, the Fiesta. The light-segment car has been warmly received by the motoring press (more here) and the Ford President claims that sales so far have exceeded the company's expectations, but it was still outsold by the Holden Barina and the Mazda2 last month, let alone the titans of the VFACTS light-car segment, Yaris and Getz.

Now the Barina sells in some volume to fleets, but the Mazda and the Fiesta share the same platform -- and Mazda makes no secret of its policy to sell cars to private buyers only. Also, the entry-level Mazda2 is just $60 cheaper than the entry-level Fiesta. So how can Ford claim the Fiesta is selling in better than expected numbers when it's still playing second fiddle to a car so close in specification and pricing?

Basically it boils down to that long-standing problem of Ford logistics. Ford's Cologne plant, according to Burela, can't ship enough automatic variants to meet the demand and the self-shifting models were launched later than the manual Fiesta. Therefore, the sales volume of 2192 units for the year to date not only represents an improvement on the 2088 cars sold for the same period in 2008 -- a much better climate for new-car sales -- but was achieved with very little automatic stock available. 

It's not the first time by any means that Ford has been unable to sell a model in the volumes it would have liked to achieve. The Focus has been consistently bedeviled by inadequate stock levels for certain variants, the Mondeo was introduced with insufficient diesel variants available and even the Transit commercial vehicle has been subject to a shortfall in supply. It's only the locally-manufactured cars that can be delivered in a reasonable timeframe.

Burela discounts the Fiesta's presence in its respective VFACTS segment anyway. He prefers instead -- on the strength of the Fiesta's packaging and value -- to compare it with the Toyota Corolla in the small-car segment. He makes the valid point that a high-spec Fiesta can be purchased for about the same money as an entry-level Corolla.

"The top of the range Fiesta is the same price as the entry-level Corolla -- and then people say to me: 'Isn't the Corolla a bigger car?'

"And I say: 'People don't actually buy cars by segments, necessarily'. They buy price points, they buy package, they buy features, they buy things that actually connect with their needs and wants.

"We launched the [Fiesta] last year at the Sydney Auto Show [AIMS]; we actually launched it for sale on the Australia Day long weekend in January; we then reconfirmed the vehicle in February at the Melbourne Auto Show [MIMS] -- and to date, sales have been outstripping supply.

"We have been selling more Fiestas than we expected. Here's the other really interesting thing: everyone knows that Australia is a predominantly 'automatic' market. The vast majority of all our sales on Fiesta have been manuals -- and the reason why is that we've only just started bringing in [automatic variants]."

One can see what Burela is implying here. Once Ford gets its supply of automatic Fiesta variants up to speed, the light car should really begin to sell its socks off.

Of course, that presupposes that the Fiesta will be a more popular car in automatic form than with a manual transmission. Whatever the case, the Fiesta supply problem should cease to be, once production of the car moves from Cologne to the Auto Alliance Thailand plant later this year.