ATTACK OF THE CLONES
They’ve travelled from di erent parts of the car cosmos, but these three hatches have converged in the same place. Is there anything to separate the Ford Focus, Kia Ceed and Mercedes A Class?
EACH OF THESE THREE travellers has taken a different route to get here, and has a different tale to tell. Ford’s Focus was once the talk of the town; wind back to the late ’90s and its winklepicker New Edge styling and even sharper handling were nothing short of a revolution for family carkind. It looked like no other hatch and handled like a hot one, but over the years it homogenised into an okay also-ran, its edge seemingly lost with its panel creases. Now, in new-from-theground-up Mk4 form, it’s back for another shot at the title. The Kia Ceed has taken the opposite path, from workaday journeyman to genuine contender. The Korean company’s days as a purveyor of cheap, cheerful white goods long of warranty but short of character are gone. The Ceed, and Kia as a brand, can now be considered on an entirely even footing. It’s also no longer that cheap – prices kick off from low 18s for the base 1.0-litre version, and this fully flush First Edition passes the £26k mark, broadly comparable with the well-specced Focus ST-Line X squaring up to it here. And the Ceed is newly de-punctuated – the artist formerly known as Cee’d has lost its nonsensical apostrophe for its third generation.
And the A-Class? When the original launched, almost a school year ahead of the Focus, it was a bit of a weirdo: a highrise mono-volume iconoclast with fascinating packaging but teetery handling. Mercedes had another, slightly more bloated stab at the formula with the second generation before a sudden career change to become a much more conventional – and largely undistinguished – C-segment hatch in 2012. Now in Mk4 guise it’s matured into our reigning premio-hatch champ, having seen off the VW Golf in CAR’s August 2018 Giant Test. It’s markedly pricier than the other two; can it justify the extra expense?
So, three very different paths now converging onto the same road for one test. Each has a turbocharged petrol engine around a litre and a half in size, newly independent rear suspension (standard on the Ceed, fitted to certain variants of the Focus and A-Class), and a point to prove.
Looking at them side by side, they’re also virtually the same
The previous Focus was decent to drive, but the new one is very good indeed
shape if you squint, but the three-pronged badge on one of them says things the others don’t. There is an undeniable sense of cachet about the Mercedes; during the test I did that thing where you stop slightly early for a pedestrian approaching a crossing and they feel compelled to hurry across while mouthing ‘Thank you’. But this time the gent also motioned at the Mercedes badge and mouthed ‘Nice car’.
It certainly feels a cut above inside. This is a real event interior, with clever use of surfaces and materials to create something genuinely different. Even if some of the materials feel cheaper than they look up-close, and the plastic moulding around those delicious illuminated turbine vents flexes a worrying degree if you give it a nudge, the overall impression of the various aluminium, suede, pleather and piano-black plastic elements is one of cool modernity.
You get the impression Mercedes’ designers had a lot of fun in here, and that it’s angling for a younger audience than the norm. So millennial is the new A-Class cabin that the first thing it does on start-up is ask you to sign into your own profile so it can recall your preferences for seat position, radio stations, display layout and the like. It also opts for digital screens in place of analogue dials and touch-sensitive pads in place of physical switches wherever possible.
Or, indeed, voice recognition in place of touching anything at all. Say ‘Hey Mercedes’ to wake up the Linguatronic system and followitupwith‘Takemetowork’,‘Warmmeup’or‘I’mhungry’4