Why we need another era of affordable hot hatchbacks

The hot hatches still on sale today cost from £40k – but most are being taken off sale It’s taking a while, like closing an ill-fitting lid on a plastic kitchen container. But another corner on the ‘affordable hot hatch’ tub is clicking shut, and, unlike sometimes previously, I don’t think a corner on the other side is about to pop back open again in defiance. Which is a slightly clumsy way of avoiding the ‘nail in the coffin’ cliché. Also I think it’s vanishingly rare (I could be wrong) that a coffin lid’s opposite corner creeps open again when someone is hammering down the opposite side. Anyway, what I’m saying is that Ford is preparing to unalive the Focus ST. Production ends in November, and it has been removed from price lists in the UK because all the remaining ones are accounted for. And this time I don’t think anyone is about to launch a new affordable petrol hot hatchback you could choose to consider instead. Although do go ahead and prove me wrong, somebody, please. It seems like a very long time, partly because it is, since my mate Jason, when he was a young man, bought a Citroën Saxo VTR on low- or no-interest finance and got free insurance thrown in. It even feels like a long time, although it isn’t, since Hyundai offered the i20 N for under £25k. The hot hatches that remain on sale today – and there are fewer than a handful, including the Focus ST – are basically £40k cars. So it has sort of been true for a while, but only now, with the demise of the Focus ST confirmed, does the malaise feel as terminal as it clearly has been for quite some years now. The hot hatch era is gone. Should one be sad about it? I think so. Because not very long ago, if you were young and you wanted to get into cars, you bought an ordinary hatchback with a bigger engine and some tidy suspension, and you had a nice time driving it. Then, when you were older and had a house and some money, you bought a sports car. But the mood was established early on. What’s the option now? New hot hatchbacks are too expensive, and while some fun electric cars, like the Alpine A290, are becoming affordable, that will be little solace to you if you live in a rented flat, because buying an Alpine will be too expensive, and your rented accommodation has no charger anyway. A used one? This is a possibility, if it hasn’t already been stolen or crashed. Or how about an affordable used sports car? This is also a nice idea, but it requires one to choose wisely. Since April, cars registered between 2001 and 2017 have had some wacky VED rates applied. My Audi A2 emits 119g/km of CO2 and costs £35 a year to tax. I like the lovely idea of a bargain Porsche Boxster, which emits 239g/km of CO2 – twice the amount, so naturally that will cost twice as much as the Audi to tax, yes? Actually no. It is £735 a year, 21 times as much. I doubt that banning new affordable fun cars and making thousands of old ones exhaustively expensive to run was the aim. We live in a time of complex regulation and unintended, unexpected consequences. But if you were feeling ostracised by ‘the system’ or ‘the man’ (or ‘the woman’) and were having uncharitable thoughts when a VED bill of £760 arrived (for 255g/km-plus), I completely understand why. There are fudges, loopholes, gaps in the system, of course. It’s why Ford’s main performance car in the UK is now a Ranger Raptor and there was a story in a newspaper the other day complaining about the number and size of American V8 pick-ups being privately imported to Britain. Well, if you make a satisfying domestically approved V8 near impossible to come by, that’s what people will do. And I believe in the car enough, both as the most brilliant and convenient form of transport and as a fun object for enthusiasts and hobbyists, that at whatever your budget, I can see a way into having and enjoying one. But as the affordable performance Ford disappears from price lists for the first time in my half-century life, it has never felt quite so difficult as today.

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