What's The Smallest Ford Car You Can Buy? (And Is It Sold In The US?)

Ford, like many other automakers, has seen a major shift in its vehicle lineup over the last several years, with the company moving away from sedans and small hatchbacks and toward SUVs and crossovers.

This pivot has not been happening just in America, but in Europe, where Ford has historically offered smaller models that weren't always sold on American shores. The Ford Fiesta was discontinued globally in 2023. The Ford Ka and Ka+,which were never sold in America, are gone, and the once immensely popular Ford Focus, last sold in America for the 2018 model year, will be discontinued completely in the fall of 2025.

So yes, Ford's current small cars aren't nearly as plentiful or as small as they used to be. The smallest vehicle Ford builds is now the Puma, a popular subcompact crossover SUV for the European market, which isn't currently sold in America.

Though the Puma crossover is a relative newcomer to Ford's lineup, the name has some history to it. The Puma name was first used on a sporty, European market small coupe that Ford released in the late 1990s. Car and Driver favorably compared the Puma to a Mazda Miata. 

It was then revived in 2019 for use on a new subcompact crossover based on the Fiesta platform. Since its introduction, the Puma crossover has become one of Ford's most popular vehicles in Europe, in many ways picking up where the discontinued Fiesta left off. In fact, for 2024, the Puma was the UK's best-selling vehicle.

The Puma can be had a few different ways, including an EcoBoost hybrid, an enthusiast-focused ST model, and now a fully-electric version known as the Puma Gen-E. With the loss of the Fiesta and Focus, some American enthusiasts had been hoping Ford might bring the Puma to the US, with the ST version being an especially sweet piece of forbidden fruit. But now, more than five years later, that doesn't look like it's going to happen.

In Europe, the Puma fits neatly below the Ford Kuga (aka the Escape) in the lineup, measuring 166.4 inches long and 71 inches wide. But with no Puma available here, what is the smallest Ford model currently sold in America? It depends on which measurement you're looking at, but it's going to be a variant of the closely related Escape, Bronco Sport, and Maverick. 

When looking at length, it's the rugged Bronco Sport that's the shortest of the bunch at 172.7 inches. When looking at width, at 72.6 inches wide, the Maverick pickup is almost two inches narrower than the Bronco Sport and Escape, but with its pickup bed, the Maverick is significantly longer at 199.7 inches.  The more traditional crossover-shaped Escape slots right into the middle, with a nearly identical width to the Bronco Sport and a total length of 180.1 inches.

Looking back, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that long ago when small cars were going to be the next big thing, and Ford did the whole "Fiesta Movement" campaign to help spread the word about its pint-sized new Fiesta to American car buyers. Fast forward about 15 years, and the Fiesta is dead globally, with the Focus following suit, and the two smallest Fords you can buy in America are now either a Bronco or a pickup truck.