FORD PUMA ST HYBRID

New automatic version of hot crossover costs just £10 more-but there's a catch...

- STEVE CROPLEY

If you look at it in a certain way, choosing the new mild-hybrid version of Ford's popular Puma ST sport crossover instead of the original pure-petrol model will cost you precisely a tenner.

Deciding between that pure petrol car (with a six-speed manual gearbox) and the new MHEV one (with a seven-speed automatic) may therefore seem a straightforward decision: use less fuel and emit less CO₂ for a tiny extra outlay. But it's nowhere near that simple.

The Puma ST's petrol-manual powertrain is the familiar 198bhp 1.5-litre three-cylinder turbo setup that we all know and admire from the now-departed Fiesta ST. It returns a combined 42.8mpg on the WLTP test cycle, emits 149g/km of CO2 and gives the car a decent 0-62mph sprint time of 6.7sec.

However, the Puma ST Hybrid uses the smaller, 1.0-litre turbo triple as its main powerplant, linked to an integrated 48V starter generator (ISG) that can collect modest amounts of electrical energy when the car is slowing and deploy it again when the car accelerates.