From 1994-2004 I was working and living in South Korea, so this little car will always be a Kia Pride to me. Back when these little cars were new, the Pride had an almost cult-like following. The Pride was famous for being as tough as nails.
Korea is not exactly known for its love of Japan, but my Korean buddies knew the Pride was a Mazda 121 under the Kia name tags. At the time, Korea cars were still pretty sketchy in quality. There was a widespread belief that good cars got exported and qc rejects got sold in Korea. The Mazda 626 Kia Capitol was another example and was very popular in Korea.
The brand new plate shows this car has just been registered. I’d be willing to wager this little car will be on the road for while longer.
Very reliable, and fun to drive! Had 2 of em myself, both white 90 models so after the upgrade to fuel injection and 5-speed. Full of that inherent Mazda goodness, FOUR whole cylinders – take that Geo Metro! Could buy a complete set of brand new 12″ tires for 60 bucks.
Had a 1990 Festiva L 5 speed EFI (same color!). I sold it when moving across country, but I loved that little thing. Traded in an unreliable Camry on it, was a great little car while I had it. I ended up doing plugs, wires and an oil pan gasket on it.
Rest assured, that isn’t the last one running around. I still see them for sale and being driven.
Believe it or not, I just saw one last week, in Orange, Virginia. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to photograph it.
Before that, the last Festiva I saw was a about 4 years ago – I was able to get a picture of that one. Definitely a rarity among small cars around here.
Hey, that’s a highly equipped model (says GL, but body color bumpers and spoiler). I bet it has a tachometer.
I believe they went L, GL, LX, with some sort of sport package on GL and LX that includes alloys as well as tachometer, body color bumper and the spoiler.
One of mine had the tiny alloys and body color bumpers – that hatchtop spoiler was a dream of mine! What was cool was if you pulled power mirrors and a tach cluster out of a junkyard, all the wiring was there ready for plug N play!
And yes GL was the upgraded model.
Such a utilitarian design, that managed to look as cute as any small car in its day, thanks to its stubby and tall proportions.
Most states and provinces, use medium or bold weight condensed typefaces to aid in quick identification from a distance, of their numbers and letters. British Columbia appears to use a slightly lighter weight face. Almost a regular weight, that’s a bit harder to read far away than most other plates. Wonder if there was a rationale. Or that was simply the choice they made in the concepts.
Our licence plates have a bit of a story to them.
In 1986, the present design was introduced for the Expo 86 World’s Fair. The first series was:
AAA-999
When they ran out of numbers, they went to:
999-AAA.
When this ran out, the DMV was in a quandary: add a seventh character or rearrange the characters. There was no desire to acquire new machinery, so this format was adopted:
AA9-99A
My car is a GW-L series but I have seen new cars with SS9-99S. This means they are running out of plates again.
Similar problem here in Ontario, until they switched to four letters and three numbers.
We also have a new dark blue plate design introduced in 2019, that can’t be read clearly at night. Approximately 218,000 new blue plates were made. Around 193,000 plates were issued, and approximately 175,000 remain in use today. And the Ontario government still hasn’t released a plan to solve the issue.
The plan will have to wait until Doug gets back from the cottage.
Hahaha I’d love to trade premiers, and parties, straight up.
But I have far too much respect for your province. Nobody deserves Ford. 🙂
The Mazda 3 is very popular around here, as are all Mazda products. As can be seen from the cars parked in the background, trucks are not so common here. At $2.00 per litre and cramped parking, it is easy to see why.
And those original plates were coded to the city/area they were issued. I am still using a VCAxxx plate issued in Victoria all those years ago. As long as the type of vehicle stays the same, the plates can be transferred over. So mine are around 36 years old. But they need replacement since they are too faded for plate readers and I am due for a stern talk with our local RCMP.
I’ve had just the one set of 123-ABC licence plates since moving to BC 11 years ago. They’re still in good shape, but I’ve been thinking about getting a set of the BC Parks kermode bear plates ($50 up front; +$40 each year; proceeds go to the provincial parks). If I do that, I guess I’d have to take the screwy red bulbs out my licence lights and put white ones in.
Can’t say I’m a big fan of the sorta-postal-code mashup of letters and numbers, but it’s better than seven characters crammed illegibly and unmemorably together like ABCD123 or ABC1234. Still, there’s only so much space on the licence plates we use in the Americas, and given that, I think California’s is the smartest way to handle it. Does any other jurisdiction do like California on this? They keep ABC123 but add a digit in front of it: ABC123, 1ABC123, 2ABC123, 3ABC123, etc. Seems to me three letters and three digits, with initial series number kept in memory as a separate item, is easier to remember than a 3+4 or 4+3 group. Could make it maybe even better by changing the plate colours with each series.
(as for legibility, I think the Europeans have the better idea)
An infuriating thing about BC licence plates is that the province only uses 20 out of 26 letters in the alphabet. I can understand them skipping I and O due to ambiguity with 1 and 0…but if the province had added Q, U, Y, and Z to the sequence, it could have squeezed over 11 million more combinations out of the easy-to-remember ABC-123 and 123-ABC formats, which would have been enough to last it for close to 20 years!
That’s bizarre and dumb; I wonder why they skip those. If I cross my eyes and squint I can almost make a weak case for skipping Q (might be mistaken for 0) and Z (might be mistaken for 7, though that kind of falls apart because I think the 7 in BC’s plate font has a curved stem). But why would they skip U and Y?
As far as I know, California is the only jurisdiction in North America that uses the 1ABC123 format.
To me, the alphanumeric mashup like BC (several US states do that too) is wretched, because it makes quick identification very tough. ABC-123 is best, but I’ve found ABC-1234 is second-best from an identification standpoint.
Been there done that in California.
XXX999 black
000XXX blue
1XXX000 blue
2XXX000 white
Now we are at 9XXX000 and moving fast. What happens when we hit 9ZZZ999?
Presumably A111AAA…A999ZZZ, then B111AAA…B999ZZZ, etc.
Or AAA111A…ZZZ999A, then AAA111B…ZZZ999B, etc.
Well that does give you 26 letters to use in front vs. 9 numbers.
In a CC moment, I was walking to the pharmacy in Rego Park last night and a red Festiva driven by a young Asian woman whipped around the corner from Wetherole onto 63rd Drive and I wished I had my camera handy.
Going off topic here, but that’s a great photo. I love the guy on the E-bike doing a photobomb.
I was just noticing all the Mazdas in the background. Appropriate since this was a Mazda design.
The pic was taken in the 1100 block of W14th Ave in Vancouver, across the street from my sons’ elementary school. It is a bike route, traffic calmed area. Parents take their kids to school on their E-bikes.
It is also an area of many professionals. They have plenty of pocket money, so E-bikes are everywhere. I hear them whizzing past my 700 block W14th home all the time.
This brings another issue: are E-bikes motor vehicles? They are supposed to be limited to 20 km/h but it is easy to get around that. It is only a matter of time before something bad happens, because I see said E-bikes whizzing through the four way stop on my block
It rains like the dickens here. Not sure how many days I’d want to ride on in the winter.
Not the last one left. Jay Leno has one.
These are still around in small numbers here in eastern PA, believe it or not. And still a regular sight to see fresh junkyard arrivals with current (not to say legitimate, due to rust) inspection stickers. I know someone who owned one for a year or two less than five years ago as a knockaround beater.
I see maybe two a year now? But by far the best condition one was my most recent spot. This beautiful red example street parked in an Atlanta neighborhood. The ones that are daily transport tend to be beat beyond recognition so I don’t know how this stayed so nice.
Are these images working?
That one did, and it is a very clean example!
Had a high-end (LXi?) model back in 1989, excellent car except for the Yokohama tires which I swear were made out of bakelite and were sketchy as hell on wet roads. I had the car break loose of me more than once in the rain while being driven cautiously.
My favorite memory, however, is that I’d just stared in 17th century reenactment at that time, and it being my only four wheeled transportation, it got stuck as the transporter for the company’s pikes (16′ foot long spears). Made a roof rack out of 2×2’s and strapped the pikes to them, keeping the butt ends even with the back bumper – which meant that the spearheads stuck out about 3′ plus over the front bumper. Definitely kept traffic ahead of me edgy, especially little old ladies doing 10mph under the speed limit.
When I was shopping for an economy hatchback in the summer of ’89, I completely ignored the Festiva. Road trips were in my future, and the Festivas I’d ridden in were miserable on the highway. I wound up with an Omni. Even in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t choose the Festiva.
I felt very squished in an Omnrizon, I had no room to move, and I’m not a big guy (under 6′, 32″ waist then and now). By contrast, the Festiva felt airy and roomy, with abundant headroom.
Drove mine to Canada once, don’t remember being especially uncomfortable…except when I buried the 85 MPH speedometer somewhere on I-5 in Skagit County, haha. It definitely felt weird on 12″ tires, and I didn’t hold it there long.
I’d have loved to have upgraded to some 14″ wheels from an Escort or something, but the hubs were unique to the Festiva and upgrading to those from an Aspire is common amongst owners.
I adored my 1988 Festiva LX.
$6666 brand new.
I had it a decade, over 240,000 miles.
Traded it in and saw it again a decade later.
I’d love to have another.
I think the Fiat 500 will be the next Ford Fiesta (’76 to ’80) or Festiva (’94-’04) in the North America . The 500 is small, fun to drive, and will become a cheap set of wheels once this COVID used car nonsense fades into the background. FIATUSA.com only lists the 500X, so a support group or forum is appropriate to keep the two door 500 rolling as a Curbside Outake.
In my entire walking area, and this is pretty sizable, there is a grand total of one Fiat 500. There were, at one time, loads of Kia Prides.
About 5 years ago we bought a 2012 Fiat 500 as a second car, primarily for around town use. I love small cars and there are so few choices now. No more Micras and Echos. In our town ours was the second one I was aware of, but several more have been added. So far it has been reliable, with the exception of the cables running to the hatch door. The way it is designed there is too much twisting and I have had to temp air broken wires 3 times. My niece has one she has owned since new and she has not had a problem. My guess is that she does not use the trunk as much as we do.
One thing that has surprised me is that several 500L have appeared in the last 2 years. So few were sold that I don’t know where these are coming from.
My dad had one, a turquoise 5sp, bought new in 92. He loved that it was such a fuel miser. He traded it a few years later for the “upgrade” Ford Aspire. Again a fuel sipper.
I can’t recall if there was anything else he was particularly enamoured by, but being he was a skinflint I’m sure it was primarily gas mileage he was looking for.
To be sure, he bought the Festiva as a manual specifically to spite my mom. That’s a long story which I’ve touched on in past comments.
Have to say I have only seen no more than 10 of these cars in the Bay Area starting with a girlfriend in 1994. This stuff amazes me since we have the kind of weather that doesn’t weather cars terribly compared to places with tons of rain, snow, or hot sun.
I still see a green one here on Champaign-Urbana Illinois.
Still looks OK.
But I haven’t seen a Aspire in some time.
And Chevy Aveos appear to be dying off.
The area is home to a lot of penniless students and eccentrics.
Ford Australia imported the Festiva during the 90’s here. Hands-down worst car I had ever driven when new, it made my mother’s 1984 Holden Camira feel like the most refined car ever made. Still see the cockcoach vile vehicles as mobile homes for the homeless, around the streets of Melbourne.
You might want to check the FordFestiva.com group on Facebook. There’s a ton of them being restored on there.
Spotted this one last year on an early morning in Calgary. I love these simple, functional cars.