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Find out if the Ford Fiesta ST can match Europe's latest hot hatches

The V8 grunt of the Mustang has defined Ford performance cars in the US for the last 50 years, but in Europe, the Blue Oval has nearly as a long history of building some of the best hot hatches on the market with the Fiesta, Escort and later the Focus. The latest Fiesta ST has just hit the roads on both sides of the pond and has been enthusiastically received thanks to its combination of a peppy, turbocharged engine and hatchback utility.
However, Europe is getting a bumper crop of hot hatches at the moment, including the forthcoming, third-generation Mini Cooper S. Should Ford have waited to launch the ST until it knew how the competition performed? That's the answer that Xcar is after in its latest video, and it took the Fiesta to the track and some very misty, Welsh roads to find out. Scroll down to find out whether the ST stacks up.

Three automotive tech trends to watch in 2018 and beyond

Every year, technology plays a bigger and bigger role in the auto industry. To put things in perspective, 10 years ago iPod integration and Bluetooth were cutting-edge in-car innovations, and smartphones and apps weren't yet a thing since the first iPhone was only about six months old. And I can't recall anyone talking about autonomous cars. Compare that to today, with mainstream coverage of the auto industry dominated by autonomous technology, along with electrification and almost every move made by Tesla. These three topics were the most significant trends of car tech in 2017 and I believe they will continue to shape the auto industry in 2018 and beyond. Let's examine them. Full Autonomy Gets Closer to Reality While there were many developments this year that indicate we're inching closer to fully autonomous vehicles, I was behind the wheel for hours to witness one of them. In October I had the chance to test Cadillac Super Cruise on a 700-mile, 11-hour drive from Dallas to Santa Fe – and had my hands on the wheel for maybe 45 minutes max throughout the entire trip. Super Cruise is far from making the Cadillac CT6 or any GM vehicle fully autonomous, and has limitations such as functioning only on pre-mapped main highways. While it simply adds a layer of lane centering to adaptive cruise control, the technology will go a long way in making mainstream drivers more comfortable with letting machines take over. On a separate front, GM is pushing ahead with fully autonomous vehicles and announced last month that it plans to launch of fleets of self-driving robo-taxis in several urban areas in 2019. While most automakers are also in the race to make autonomous cars a reality, GM's turbocharging of its efforts appeared to be in response to Waymo, which announced just weeks earlier that its Early Rider Program in the Phoenix area would go completely driverless. The Early Rider Program launched last April, offering the public a chance to ride in Waymo's autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans. In this new phase of testing, Waymo is using its own employees as guinea pigs instead of the public while the vehicles operate without a human behind the wheel, and takes another giant step forward for fully autonomous driving.

Ward's calls out Ford's EcoBoost engines for their crummy fuel economy

With a name like EcoBoost, one might expect Ford's line of turbocharged engines to be somewhat, um, economical. In other words, replacing displacement with a turbocharger is supposed to deliver better fuel economy. Based on the experience time and time again of multiple Autoblog editors, your author included, this is simply not the case. Now, Ward's is calling out the cruddy efficiency numbers of Ford's EcoBoost line of engines. The column dresses down not just the new 2.7-liter V6 of the 2015 F-150, but also the 2.3-liter of the Mustang, the 1.5-liter from the Fusion and the 3.2-liter PowerStroke diesel found in the Transit, while also explaining why just one Ford engine was named to Ward's 10 Best Engines list. In its testing of all four engines, Ward's editors never came even remotely close to matching the 2.7's claimed 26 miles per gallon (for two-wheel-drive models), with the truck's computer indicating between 17.6 and 19 mpg over a 250-odd-mile run. Calculating the fuel economy manually revealed an even more depressing 15.6 miles per gallon. Criticisms with the 2.3-liter four-cylinder focused on its strange soundtrack, although it was business as usual with the 1.5-liter and 3.2 diesel, with Ward's criticizing the fuel economy of both engines. The 1.5, which Ward's claims is sold as a hybrid alternative, failed to get over 30 miles per gallon, while the five-cylinder turbodiesel's figures couldn't stand up against FCA's 3.0-liter EcoDiesel. The entire column really is worth a read, especially if you were disappointed in Ward's decision to only salute Ford's three-cylinder EcoBoost while shunning the rest of the company's new turbocharged mills.