Fiesta made in Australia for India

FORD Australia’s design and engineering capability has been showcased again, this time via a Fiesta sedan revealed this week in India.

The locally-developed Fiesta, codenamed B376 and revealed by GoAuto in June, follows the Ford Australia-produced Focus Concept that appeared at last year’s Beijing motor show.

Like the Chinese Focus concept, the Indian Fiesta demonstrates the ability of the Melbourne-based Ford Asia Pacific Design facility.

While Ford Australia won’t divulge details of the subcontinental Fiesta until its official launch in November – and won’t reveal what other projects it is or may be working on – it’s keen to stress its global design role.

"The reveal of the new Fiesta is an exciting time for the product development team at Ford Australia," said Ford Australia vice-president of product development Trevor Worthington.

"Working with our counterparts around the world, we have provided a complete design and engineering service, from styling and packaging to full engineering, testing and validation.

"The team targeted class-leading attributes of package, dynamics and styling, based on an existing architecture, and fine-tuned with the expertise we developed on Falcon and Territory," he said.

Based on the European Fiesta but developed for the subcontinent, Ford says projects like the Indian Fiesta also allows it to better spread resources across the company.

"Great design and engineering staff are hard to find," said Mr Worthington. "When you do find them, they can be hard to retain because the cyclical nature of this industry can mean huge peaks and troughs in engineering and design requirements.

"Projects such as the new Fiesta mean that the talent we have developed through work on Falcon and Territory can be further developed and deployed across other projects.

"Once we might have lost talented people simply because of the cyclic nature of our own engineering requirements. Now we have expanded our pool of highly trained people and given them additional variety and challenge in working across a wider range of products and customer requirements."