[gkoneti]

Thanks Ashish and Arjun.

Secondly, if you know about any leftover Fiesta stock, please let me know. One of my colleague is keen to buy it.

[itsashishsharma]

Originally Posted by gkoneti

Thanks Ashish and Arjun.

Secondly, if you know about any leftover Fiesta stock, please let me know. One of my colleague is keen to buy it.

I don't think so as it has been more than one and a half years since production of Fiesta was stopped. I have seen a few Fiestas running on Bangalore roads and all seem to be in pretty good condition as only enthusiasts bought it, so I am sure getting a used car in immaculate condition should be possible.

[gkoneti]

What a sad decision by Ford. They have now announced Aspire special edition with Fiesta design alloys. Could be old stock of alloys leftover from Fiesta production line. But dear Ford, this is not justified. Thanks.

[hserus]

I just got an end 2014 manufactured and registered facelift fiesta - bought by a dealer from Ford India after it was used as an employee's corporate issued car for 20k km. Ford apparently sells them to the employee / gives preference to ford employees who want to buy it, but after that does a public auction once such company cars complete three years.

A few hundred of these were issued to ford employees so should be coming into the market sooner rather than later.

This dealer in chennai tends to buy several cars at Ford's auctions. http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/chenna...s-chennai.html

[vnabhi]

Originally Posted by hserus

I just got an end 2014 manufactured and registered facelift fiesta - bought by a dealer from Ford India after it was used as an employee's corporate issued car for 20k km. Ford apparently sells them to the employee / gives preference to ford employees who want to buy it, but after that does a public auction once such company cars complete three years.

A few hundred of these were issued to ford employees so should be coming into the market sooner rather than later.

This dealer in chennai tends to buy several cars at Ford's auctions. http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/chenna...s-chennai.html

Congrats, and thanks for sharing the news! May I ask how much you got it for? And pictures please!

[hserus]

Got it for 6.4 after bargaining and I'm sure I could have bargained a good bit more but this is a clean car with tyres and battery in decent condition and absolutely no work of any sort required - I can take it out onto the highway tomorrow and no issues. The only thing I needed to do was to fit 3M sun film but that's not what you would call necessary

Two pics of the exterior are on the vj cars thread.

This dealer had at least one other fiesta (silver early 2015 registration) when I was looking but was offering t for about a lakh costlier with like three months between the dates of the two registrations. Yeah 2014 VS 2015 car and all that.

[hserus]

Originally Posted by noopster

Sensor panel for the auto headlamp & rain sensing wiper is located behind the IRVM. It's rather big and prominent:

Yeah - this sensor panel. Does it have anything that'd interfere with an RFID tag such as the Fastag for tolls? Also Ford seems to have added a black dotted pattern to the windshield behind the IRVM - that too would interfere with visibility I think.

What's the best spot to paste a fastag in this case? Thanks.

[arunramaswamy]

I think in this case it would be best to use a temporary solution. Just have a celotape on the back of the fastag and stick to top left of the windshield. Probably somewhere in the passenger side should work. Once it works, the tag can be fixed permanently.

[hserus]

Originally Posted by arunramaswamy

I think in this case it would be best to use a temporary solution. Just have a celotape on the back of the fastag and stick to top left of the windshield. Probably somewhere in the passenger side should work. Once it works, the tag can be fixed permanently.

Thanks - others have recommended sticking it just below the sensor and that works for them. I'll use a tape and experiment.

[hserus]

The Aliexpress 11/11 bug bit me hard. And then the Black Friday sale on Aliexpress. See the attached pictures for what I've ordered for my Fiesta.

The stereo is Android, and they claim it seamlessly supports Ford Sync with the old Sync v1 that's present on the 2014 Fiesta (with an old Nokia phone style Fascia and a LCD display rather than touchscreen).

Also - OBD-II Scanner, Reverse Camera, TPMS, Leather Seats, Leather Steering Wheel Cover.

Originally Posted by hserus

I just got an end 2014 manufactured and registered facelift fiesta - bought by a dealer from Ford India after it was used as an employee's corporate issued car for 20k km. Ford apparently sells them to the employee / gives preference to ford employees who want to buy it, but after that does a public auction once such company cars complete three years.

A few hundred of these were issued to ford employees so should be coming into the market sooner rather than later.

This dealer in chennai tends to buy several cars at Ford's auctions. http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/chenna...s-chennai.html

[VKS]

Originally Posted by hserus

The Aliexpress 11/11 bug bit me hard. And then the Black Friday sale on Aliexpress. See the attached pictures for what I've ordered for my Fiesta

You used the sale to the fullest. Please share pictures once you get them installed.

Accessories are difficult to source in Indian market for car like Fiesta. Customisation is the only option.

Btw, any plans of adding a tuning box to the car?

[hserus]

Originally Posted by VKS

You used the sale to the fullest. Please share pictures once you get them installed.

Accessories are difficult to source in Indian market for car like Fiesta. Customisation is the only option.

Btw, any plans of adding a tuning box to the car?

I am a very sedate driver and this car just works for me. Won’t meddle with the engine.

There are huge shipping delays due to the festive season and the goods may well arrive when I am out of town on vacation later this month. Got to see.

[hserus]

Update -

I have received and fitted the stereo, which is an Android 6 model branded "Xeowyn".

Stereo Details -

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/7-Ca...311.0.0.kQYQxT

Price: US $462.00 / piece
Discount Price: US $346.50

Seller Details -

The Aliexpress seller for this product, Navitech is based in Guangdong, China. Their representative Lisa Peng speaks excellent English. She is very professional and responsive and I can highly recommend her store. I also picked up a reverse camera and an OBD2 from her (these are still in transit).

It was sent through GATI China (a group company of the Indian courier / transporter GATI) and while shipped promptly by the seller, it took several days to ship mostly because of 11/11 sale related delays at the courier. Lisa Peng @ the seller took the initiative to contact the courier when I reached out to her after 10 days were past, and they shipped it immediately.

By some miracle, Indian customs didn't charge a single paisa of duty on the deck!!!

Installation -

The build quality is solid - a heavy duty aluminium box for the stereo hardware and solid plastics that match the color of your fiesta dash. The wiring is heavy duty and with good quality connectors. The old Nokia type keypad control panel on your Fiesta that has phone / aux selectors, number dialling etc is retained in place and works out of the box with this new deck.

The installation is plug and play for the Fiesta's existing stereo except one or two things -

1. Supplement the old USB 2 cable on the stock deck with an USB 3 cable ++ extender because the old cable is a bit too short.

2. The stereo unit takes a little effort to fit into the bay from which the old Fiesta stereo was removed because there are several additional cables available to connect Reverse Camera, TPMS etc, so these take up a good bit of space. The install is quite neat (the addon USB cables fitted into the glovebox).

They seem to have reverse engineered all of Ford Sync's features so the sensor alerts such as door open, AC temperature etc are all displayed on the stereo. This might be because of the CANBUS decoder they fitted that had an older Ford Sync firmware version stamped on it (v 1.52.0058YPT5 instead of the v 1.59 that the stock stereo has).

A small antenna for the GPS chip is placed onto your dashboard.

The device has SIM connectivity and wifi available so you can install Google Maps from the play store (after either inserting a SIM or as I have plenty of unused data, I just connected to wifi from my phone's hotspot). It also has a SD card slot in the dashboard unit.

For this of course you have to activate play store with your google ID and it will upgrade a number of apps, including the play store itself) .. so make sure you have a good amount of spare data available or park the car in range of your home broadband wifi if possible.

Bluetooth shows you two hotspots - Sync on which it might still broadcast and even pair with your phone, but don't use that, and SVU-Android, which works great with a default PIN of 0000 that you can change from the control panel. In short - choose SVU-Android and "forget this device" for the SYNC hotspot.

What I like about the stereo -

The deck has acceptable performance and very decent sound quality. There are a wide variety of sound mixer settings (Rock, Concert etc) available. It also has DVD and DVR, the old deck just had a CD drive.

This is not a device for totally serious audiophiles but it does have options to control the position of the driver (left or right) so that the sound is directed appropriately.

I have played a variety of music - hard rock (Metallica, AC/DC, Deep Purple), Jazz / Blues / Soul (Sinatra, Miles Davis, James Brown) and Carnatic (Chembai, Abhishek Raghuram etc) more or less non stop on my travel over the weekend to Bangalore and back from Chennai and they all sound very nice indeed on this deck.

The deck has a certain amount of internal storage too on which they have loaded three English songs (a very nice Carpenters song and a couple of others).

Now the (minor) niggles -

This stereo has a very respectable performance as it is, but it could do with a few extra CPU cores and has a limited amount of memory.

Don't sync your phone contacts if you have hundreds of numbers!!!

I can't say this strongly enough, please don't try to sync 700+ contacts there like I did. I had to restore them to my Google account from a backup set of contacts I maintain on my iCloud, after the Android threw an alert "too many contacts - delete, keep" etc - I foolishly chose delete. Afterwards I just chose to stop the device from syncing my contacts, things feel much better now.

Pairing my iPhone 7 is a bit dodgy with the Bluetooth occasionally emitting a hissing noise during calls, skipping a second or so in the middle of playing a track, or briefly disconnecting sometimes. A fix is that I didn't sync my contacts and refrained from pushing too much over Bluetooth. For example, Google Maps on my phone giving directions ++ the music was causing skipping so I installed the maps app on the deck instead from the app store. Once I did that, it felt much better with call quality coming through clear as well.

Along with your phone's ringtone, the device also has a very loud "old style telephone" type ringtone that kicks in when your phone rings. I need to find out how to turn that off, once I get a few minutes to spare with that deck.

The default volume out of the box is set at deafening levels (26 or so) - or maybe this was because of the guy who installed the deck. The sound quality is quite audible and clear even at 6-10. Turning it up to 20+ when playing heavy metal is a fun experience of course.

Pairing works much better when I pair an Android phone instead. (confirmed by the seller that the device has occasional issues when paired with iPhone 7).

Photos below.

[hserus]

Mods sorry for the back to back posts - as they deal with different products it’s easier to split them apart.

Leather seats -
http://s.aliexpress.com/I3ArYvqm


Bad - I got cheap PU seats instead despite claims of genuine leather in the product description. I’ve raised a dispute with Ali Express. The seller is highly rated so it is possible they shipped a wrong product rather than this being fraudulent, got to see.

Seller - Meibo Technology
http://s.aliexpress.com/2EnQf2aQ

Cost - $239.88 for a set that includes neck and back cushions for four seat covers

Product was shipped from China through Singapore Post (aka our Speedpost). All the goods were packed in a transparent plastic zipped suitcase sort of container, securely packed in a nylon sack.

The product arrived on time and customs didn’t charge a penny - it was under invoiced by the shipper at $150 instead of the actual value.

[prakash24979]

Congrats on your purchase!! The unit looks cool.
Can the same unit be fitted on Trend version of the car? The Trend version does not have phone or Bluetooth connectivity and the steering controls are only for controlling media.

Did you fit it yourself or took 'professional' help?