Comparison Tests
From the July 2014 Issue of Car and Driver
Sitting 80 miles north of the Mexican border, in the epicenter of America’s pepper-growing belt, is the village of Hatch, New Mexico. A small farming community of 1648 inhabitants, Hatch is famous for the chile peppers that bear the town’s name. In fact, Hatch is the “Chile Capital of the World.” It’s possible that this title might be self-administered. The town even has an annual Labor Day festival to celebrate the mouth-numbing power of its chiles. Based on more than just spelling, rest assured that the little town of Hatch does not consider the Chili’s restaurant chain an authentic outpost of Tex-Mex cuisine.
But chiles, the peppers, are everywhere in Hatch. They’re growing in the fields just outside downtown and drying in clusters called chile ristras at roadside stands. This tiny town built on hotness seemed like the perfect destination for a test of hatchbacks with high Scoville ratings. Why? Well, if you’ve ever had a cheeseburger smothered in Hatch chiles, you’d understand. Hatch’s peppers transform an ordinary cheeseburger into something bordering on the transcendental. Which is sort of what happens when a carmaker turns a dull economy car into a hot hatch.
With a price target of $25,000, we invited three cars to compete. The Mini Cooper S is freshly redone and the newest of the bunch. It might look like the same old Mini, but it’s larger and more powerful than before. Making the heat is a 189-hp, turbocharged 2.0-liter four designed by Mini’s parent company, BMW.
For its initial comparison-test appearance, we chose the Ford Fiesta in the ST guise that wowed every one of us last year and won itself a place on our 10Best list. The third entry is the weaponized Fiat 500, the Abarth edition. A hellion of a car with an unmuffled 1.4-liter turbo four, the Abarth made the cut despite losing a comparison test a couple of years ago because it’s still a sub-$30,000 car we can get excited about, and it also competes directly with this set.
After 600 miles of pegged redlines and Cottonelle wipes, we judged one of our Hatch hatches to be the hottest.
