Ford’s Ka – the cheeky, lovable and classless city car – is back. Still called Ka, the new model will make its show debut at Paris in autumn 2008, before going on sale in the UK by the end of the year. The underpinnings are, of course, from the Fiat 500, but Blue Oval engineers have tweaked the chassis to give the Ka a proper Ford feel, they say.
The new Ford Ka looks good. Is it another Martin Smith design?
It is, and that means the Ka comes wearing Ford's vogueish 'Kinetic design' tag. At the front are two opposing trapezoid grilles, though on the tiny Ka these are formed from a black plastic bumper dividing the single large intake.
All Kinetic design cars are supposed to have wedgy silhouettes, to emphasise the dynamics, and the Ka’s sweptback headlamps and angular glasshouse are designed to disguise the car's Italian Fiat 500 origins.
The Ka's rear haunches and back end appear to have slight Vauxhall Corsa overtones, but then Martin Smith’s previous employer was GM…
How has Ford managed to tweak the Fiat 500 platform to make it different from the Italian product?
'All the hard points of the car were already defined,’ says Smith. ‘We were limited by the architecture of the car, but free to change everything you see, touch and feel.
'Fiat has gone retro. But while we have a design icon in the Ka, we didn’t want to do evolutionary or retro. We wanted Kineti-Ka! It’s all the elements of Kinetic design in a different format. The Ka is chunky and cheeky where the Fiesta is sleek and stylish.’
Click 'Next' below to read more about the new Ford Ka
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