First Drive: Ford Fiesta's tiny engine is smooth fun

IRVINE, Calif. -- The first thing you notice about the Ford Fiesta's turbocharged three-cylinder engine -- the smallest engine of any current car -- is what you don't notice.

Vibration. Three cylinder engines are notoriously unbalanced, and the quickest indication of trouble is how your teeth chatter and fingers shutter on the steering wheel. In the Fiesta with the 1-liter engine that Ford provided for test drives, it didn't happen.

The next surprise is acceleration. Ain't too bad. With 123 horsepower, the car doesn't exactly rocket from a standing-still start. But it's pickup is plenty adequate in city driving. There isn't an abundance of passing power on the highway, but there still was enough -- at least in the flatlands -- to be considered adequate.

Ford is not going to sell loads of Fiesta with the tiny engine because of one giant issue for many drivers: it is only be sold with a five-speed stick shift. That's odd, since the whole point of the car is to maximize gas mileage and many automatic transmissions these days, coupled with engine computers, shift so efficiently that they achieve better fuel economy than manual transmissions.

"It is the package they wanted to bring," says Lisa Schoder, marketing manager for Ford's small cars, as a cryptic note of explanation. She doesn't sound worried, however. About a quarter of Fiestas currently being sold have manuals, an unusually high percentage compared to the industry standard of about 5% among all vehicles. The 1-liter engine has been on sale for several months.

The 1-liter EcoBoost turbo engine is designed to make this particular Fiesta the car that comes billed as getting the best non-hybrid highway fuel economy of any on the road. It is rated at 32 miles a gallon in city driving, 45 mpg on the highway for an average of 37 mpg. In mostly city driving, we got about 26 mpg, which Ford officials said was at the lower end of what most journalists testing the car had seen.

The extra fuel economy comes at a price. For starters, the 1-liter engine is only available on the Fiesta SE, priced at $14,905 for the sedan, excluding delivery charges, and $15,405 for the hatchback. Those prices are about $1,000 more than the cheapest Fiesta, the S. Then the 1-liter engine adds another $995 to the price. The 1-liter is rated at 5 mpg more than the cheapest Fiesta in city driving, 7 mpg on the highway.

The 1-liter has been a hit in Europe, where it shows up on nearly a quarter of Fiestas sold and a third of Focuses, the next largest sedan sold in the U.S. Ford plans to introduce a 1-liter Focus in the U.S. as well. The engine has been popular enough that Ford plans to double production at the Cologne, Germany, plant where it is made.

The Ford 1-liter won the International Engine of the Year award in 2012 and 2013. It has an ultra-lower friction design and was designed to completely eliminate dreaded "turbo lag," the rubber-band-like feeling of a generation ago. "It has very little lag," says Paul Seredynski, a Ford spokesman. "It doesn't feel like a turbo."

The car is meant to be "fun and frugal, small and light." It's a thrasher, a car that can be driven hard with an engine that revs high as its turbo spools out to 250,000 spins a minute. It has the highest power density -- the most kick per liter -- of any EcoBoost engine.

The engine's real secret, however, is that lack of vibration. To achieve it, Seredynski says Ford found a way to counteract vibration of one part by playing it off another, the main pulley and the flywheel.

"It took a heck of a lot of smart engineering to do it," says George Peterson, president of consultants AutoPacific. The engine is "smooth without a balance shaft" and "sounds a lot bigger than it is."

He says he appreciates how the car felt comfortable in every gear and didn't lug or balk, even when pushing the accelerator hard in fifth gear. So far, Ford hasn't launched a big advertising campaign around the 1-liter -- even with its gas mileage figures that would make for a compelling billboard. But as gas prices slam $4 a gallon in parts of the country, that could change.

"I think it will definitely be a winner," Peterson predicts.