We take the Ford Fiesta 1.5L Titanium out for a spin!
After a few weeks of back to back event coverages and reviews, I knew I had to take a break. Luckily, I had already planned a weekend getaway to the province of Aurora to enjoy sun, sand and surf – unfortunately my ride fell through at the last minute. Facing the prospect scrapping my weekend plans, I asked Ford if they could lend me a ride to take me to my weekend retreat. They agreed, and a few days later I picked up my ride for the weekend – the Ford Fiesta 1.5L Titanium.
Initially I was a bit disappointed that I got the sedan version of Ford’s hot hatch, as I personally have a thing for hatchbacks. That’s not a dig against the Fiesta’s looks, mind you. The Fiesta looks amazing, and looks something that belongs in the showroom of a European supercar brand rather than a Ford dealership.
The inverted “Superman” front grill is very Aston Martin-esque, giving the Fiesta a very aggressive look. Under the hood lies the naturally aspirated 1.5 liter Ti-VCT engine mated with a 6-speed Powershift automatic transmission.
Stepping inside the cabin, you’re greeted by the numerous controls of the main dashboard and the central console, which functions as the nerve center of the car. We noticed that the Fiesta has fewer switches and toggles compared to another Ford car that we tested before, the Focus.
The Fiesta uses keyless entry and starts with a push of a button. At the heart of the car is Ford’s SYNC connectivity suite, which allows you to pair your audio device and phone with the car and operate them with voice commands.
Ford’s SYNC system is so good, we managed to control our music streaming from our Galaxy S4 without touching the manual controls during our 5 hour drive to Baler using the voice commands.
There’s two ways to connect your device to the SYNC system – one is through Bluetooth, and the other is through a physical USB connection using the port on the console of the car. From our testing, you can only get to use the voice commands to control your music if you connect your USB, iOS or Android device through the USB port labeled SYNC, as it indexes and reads the media files in your device and goes off of that when you tell it to play a certain track.
No voice recognition software is perfect, and that’s true with Ford’s SYNC system. It sometimes played the wrong track or artist, though we found that it had an 80% success rate when it comes to recognizing our voice commands.
Driving the Fiesta was a pleasure – the car was quick, nimble and had plenty of power and grip, things that we needed while traversing the dangerous Nueva Ecija-Aurora road in the dark.
Yes, didn’t I mention that? We set out for Baler in the dead of night, following directions using Waze on our way to our weekend getaway. The Fiesta’s HID lights helped loads during our five hour journey, lighting the way in nearly pitch black streets. The Fiesta’s nimbleness came into play as we were traversing the winding road towards Baler that the locals call the Isaw (chicken’s intestine), as the Fiesta’s powerful brakes, superb handling and awesome suspension allowed us to avoid animals who were intent on comitting suicide via Fiesta.
Even though we had to tackle more s-bends, blind curves and unpaved roads that we cared to count during our weekend drive, the drive was still pretty comfortable.
After our time with the Fiesta, we’re convinced that it’s one of the best cars in it’s class today. If you were in the market for a subcompact today, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the 2014 Fiesta.
