Back to the future: Ford Fiesta Urba
Mon, 19 Jan 2026
The future Ford Fiesta will most likely be fully electrified, but that wasn’t even a notion on Ford’s radar when it launched the Mk3 variant of the much-loved hatchback in 1989.
Back then, in much simpler times, the Blue Oval gave us the Fiesta Urba concept – a vision, it said, of what a future city car should be.
Viewed in profile, it looked just like a normal Ford Fiesta, apart from being very, very yellow and a bit grey - indeed, the seats wouldn’t have looked out of place in Lufthansa’s economy class.
Aside from the colour scheme, though, it was a fascinating car. Ford’s interpretation of what would make the ideal runabout for urban dwellers.
Its most notable feature was that if you looked at it from the driver’s side it looked just like a Fiesta three-door. From the passenger side, though, it looked like a five-door.
The idea of having one door on the driver’s side and two on the passenger’s was quite sensible really – ease of access for the driver on one side and the reassurance that little passengers travelling in the back could only alight on the kerbside. Assuming, that is, that you didn’t take it on a European holiday.
Other novelties included a removable lunch bag (yellow, of course) and a built-in fridge in the boot, which could be turned into an oven at the flick of a switch just in case you felt a sudden need to cook a pasty while on the move.
It came with an automatic CVT gearbox, which was push-button rather than lever-operated and looks a bit ridiculous today, but was massively advanced for 1989 – at least in the way that a push-button telephone or TV remote control were.
Readers of a younger generation may never understand the technological leaps forward such things represented. And when we say advanced, we refer to the controls and not the actual gearbox, as with the best will in the world, if it came with the same CVT as the standard Mk 3 Fiesta auto, then it was actually pretty awful.
We’re also completely baffled by the fact it had both a carburettor and no power steering – the combination of CVT transmission and a choke was hardly a recipe for smooth progress when cold, which would surely have made the thing lurch forward from a standstill.
Imagine having to do a three-point turn out of your crowded city street with a series of confusing buttons and the fuel mixture holding the revs at 2000rpm? No thank you. And what was a supposedly urban concept car doing with no power steering?
Nevertheless, the Urba was apparently put forward for production as part of the Mk 3 Fiesta range but was ultimately pooh-poohed by Ford’s senior management, who deemed it a bit too much of an oddity to make.
The weird hybrid oven-fridge thing and excessive yellowness, perhaps, but the door inequality less so, as the production versions of the MINI Clubman and Hyundai Veloster went on to prove a quarter of a century down the line…
