Being an automotive enthusiast is a strange world to live in. Some of the most random and unexpected things will captivate you and sometimes you can’t explain why. Take the strange, that someone spotted at the end of 2022. We wanted to know who would do such a thing to an already small car. And while someone that their friend’s father was the one who owned it, it looks like that person is putting the squished Fiesta up for sale.
The Fiesta is for sale on the Craigslist. I happened to stumble across the listing after falling down a Reddit automotive rabbit hole. To make sure this was the car we previously covered, I compared details of the car in the photos from with the ones on the Craigslist listing. Using that and the fact that the car wore a Washington license plate and that this Fiesta also happened to be listed for sale in Washington state, I’m fairly certain that this is the car. And the listing also sheds some light on the mystery.
According to the listing, it was chopped 11 years back when it was still fairly new; the owner says the modification was done when the Fiesta had just 7,000 miles on it —it currently has nearly 62,000 miles on it. The owner explains that the reason it was chopped was so that it could be easier to tow behind an RV, which is still strange considering that a Fiesta five-door hatch was just over 13 feet long.
No matter, the owner explains it’s a great car for around-town driving and it’s good on gas. With the five-speed manual, he says you can average nearly 32 miles a gallon.
While the owner says there isn’t anything mechanically wrong with the squished Fiesta, this garage chop job does come with a few caveats, the main one being it has a salvage title. Whether or not that title is the result of the chop job itself or of some other incident is unknown. Other than that, if you buy this thing you can expect to live without any modern, basic safety systems as he explains.
Given this cars background as a salvage vehicle, it does not include functioning airbags.
Also as a result of the customization done to the car, it does not have functioning ABS or traction control. Currently the only other issue with the car that I’m aware of is that it needs to have the liftgate latch replaced.
So if you’ve got an itch for a Smart car or a Scion iQ but want something more unsafe and different, you can go grab this thing for $5,100. That’s probably only more than it’s worth.