Ford Aspire

The concept of a compact sedan was brought in by Tata with the Indigo CS – an ingenious concept to offer the budget customers a sedan while using taxation to its benefit. The Aspire is the compact sedan from Ford India. The sub-four metre car has been designed for the Indian market, taking into account the regulations that will categorise it as a small car.

The looks of the Aspire are similar to many of the global Ford models under the One Ford philosophy. The front gets an Aston Martin-styled hexagonal grille with horizontal chrome stats while the face of the car gets lots of cuts and sweptback headlamps. Unlike rest of the compact sedans, the overall proportions do not actually look weird. The tail section is cut short to fit the car under four metres and is enough to give the Aspire one of the better-looking tail sections in the segment.

The interior of the car is dual-tone beige and black; the dashboard top gets the all-black treatment and the rest of the sedan is dressed in beige. The top-end version gets first in segment leather seat covers making the car look premium. The features list includes the music system from the EcoSport with voice command and Sync App that sends the car’s coordinates to the emergency services in case of an incident. The front two airbags are standard on all the variants and the top-end gets segment first six airbags. Ford has omitted the rear parking sensors, projector headlamps and rear AC vents from the features list.

The Aspire is available with both petrol and diesel engine options. The 1.2-litre petrol unit makes 88bhp and 112Nm, powering the front wheels via a five-speed manual gearbox. Ford is also offering the dual-clutch automatic petrol version of the car clubbed with the 1.5-litre petrol engine producing 110bhp and 145Nm of torque. The fuel efficiency of the manual and automatic is 18.16kmpl and 17kmpl. The 1.5-litre TDCi powering the diesel variants produces 99bhp and 215Nm of torque. This is currently the most powerful engine in the segment and also offers decent fuel efficiency at 25.83kmpl.

The Aspire is available in four trim levels – Ambiente, Trend, Titanium and Titanium Plus. Both the petrol and diesel manual are available in all four trim levels while the automatic is available only in the Titanium trim. The Aspire competes with Maruti Dzire, Tata Zest, Hyundai Xcent and the recently refreshed Honda Amaze in the compact sedan segment. The car can be bought in seven colours - ruby red, sparkling gold, oxford white, tuxedo black, deep impact blue, ingot silver and smoke grey.