The average price of a Ford car in Ireland is €38,420, which is a tad lower than the c. €42,000 average car price across all brands in the country.
BY BRIAN BYRNE
The smallest Ford you can get is the Puma, which also happens to be the cheapest model at €31,465.
Given that there are still decent sub-€20,000 small cars out there, such as the Kia Picanto or the biggest-selling small hatch Toyota Yaris from €27,815, the blue oval must be really missing what was once its best-seller, the Fiesta.
The brand as a whole isn’t even in the top ten marques in Ireland this year, but it is what it is.
I know, I normally only deal with prices at the end of a review, but I was curious to see where Ford was sitting when I got into their latest electric offering last week, the Puma Gen-E. I also hadn’t driven a Puma since 2021.
It is the brand’s best seller and it hasn’t lost the curvy charm it has had since it was first launched on the 7th-generation Fiesta platform.
A four-seat coupe masquerading as a small SUV, or vice versa depending on your point of view, I even suggest that it’s the current nicest looker in Ford’s lineup even at its age (Focus still looks really good, but it’s being dropped at the end of the year, even though currently the third best seller).
The Puma has the slimmer bumpers from a facelift last year and the new headlights.
As an electric, it features the Ford outlined blank face where the grille normally is, but this looks quite tastier than in the larger electric models.
The white in my review car is the standard; you pay extra for colours; Ol’ Henry is back but has changed his tone.
Last year’s revamp also freshened the interior materials and added a larger infotainment screen along with new graphics.
There’s also the ‘soundbar’ speaker system introduced with the Mustang Mach-E sitting on the dashboard, but not getting in the way.
The car immediately felt like a nice space when I sat in, and the tall rear roofline also makes it a fairly comfortable billet for two adults.
The boot has the so-called ‘gigabox’, a massive underfloor basement allowing 574 litres of capacity, which I made good use of while ferrying six large bags of green waste to the recycling centre.
There’s another 43 litres of stuff space available under the bonnet.
On the road, the extra 250kg of battery weight can be felt in the usual conditions, such as crossing a slow-down bump, but beyond that, the ride and handling felt pretty good.
Rather than offer crazy power, the Puma Gen-E has the equivalent of 169hp on tap and a sensible 0-100km/h of eight seconds.
All of which helps keep the range from the 43 kWh of usable battery to a reasonable level of a rated 377km combined or 277km on motorway cruising.
The Puma wasn’t particularly designed for electric conversion, and I was impressed at how well Ford has made it work.
The big surprise relates to where I came in on this, with the bottom line, as there’s less than €1,500 more involved in buying the electric Puma than going for the mild-hybrid petrol version.
That’s the level of extra investment which will be repaid in very short order indeed in fuel-energy savings.
Along with the real good feeling the Puma gave me as just a car, I’d be recommending it to anyone in this buying space.
