Ford StreetKa | Shed of the Week
Staying cool needn't cost the earth - so long as you're not fussed with looking cool...
The heat has been splitting the flags outside Shed’s workshop this week. It’s been so hot he’s had to work in nothing more than his string vest and underpants and yellow scaffolder’s boots.
There’s a massive old upright freezer in the yard that he’s managed to get working for lollies and other essential cooling aids. In the heat haze, he thought someone had painted a big letter Y on the front of it, but it turned out to be Mrs Shed facing away from him in her black thong swimsuit.
While the sun has got his hat on, whatever that means – presumably he has them made from very high-grade asbestos – what better time to introduce this week’s shed, a low-mileage Ford StreetKa. Shed has never fully understood the point of convertibles, despite or possibly because of his own experience with various MX-5s in which he used to take Mrs Shed to Italy in happier times. After a hundred hot autostrada miles with the top down, she looked like she’d had her hair done by Medusa. Italians thought they were mad.
Ford did Winter and Ice special editions of the StreetKa. They even did a Thunderbirds one in pink, with just eight of them getting past security, but they never did a Bleedin’ Hot one. Ballooning arches set it apart from anything else in the class stylistically, but they were also functional, covering wide tracks which gave the StreetKa the stability it needed to go with its fast steering. Although some of you might think that the Pininfarina body overall hasn’t stood the test of time all that well, the Parry-Jones chassis shouldn’t be suffering the same fate as long as it’s been looked after.
Scuttle shake could be disconcerting on the wrong road, even when it was new, and the mounts for the rear beam were not built to last. Still, it was more than capable of delivering plenty of smiles per mile, even with only 94hp coming its way from the 8-valve Duratec 1.6 engine. It wasn’t a revver, but its torque curve was well suited to town trundling.
We had one of these StreetKas in this feature almost exactly three years ago. Like today’s shed, that one was a Luxury spec car with climate control, a CD player – stop laughing, that was high tech back then – and heated leather seats. The metal gearknob was hot too, but that wasn’t by design. To compensate for the burns on your palms it did control a slick change.
Rust has killed most of these off. In 2012 there were 9,000 Luxury StreetKas registered for British roads. By 2022 that number had gone down to 1,400. The car featured in 2023 was a clean low-miler with 67,000 on the clock, but it didn’t make it past 2025. Now there are just over 600 left. Could they become collectable and expensive, like many other old Fords? If you want to get a car like today’s £1,875 51,000-mile shed to that stage you’ll need to keep on top of its suspension components, literally as well as figuratively.
If the previous owners of this one did the right thing by it – and if the full service history line in the ad is true, they might have – it should drive nicely. If they didn’t, it won’t. Seat runners famously rattled, the electrics could be whimsical and the hoods were annoyingly tear-prone, but it was surely better to have a fabric top that could be manually whipped down in ten seconds than some crapulous electronic steel roof that didn’t work in any amount of seconds. There was a surprisingly decent amount of boot space, too.
Shed is confident that this week’s offering will split the forum. Some will remember Wayne Rooney owning one, or Kylie Minogue advertising them. Others will deride it as a car for those with a short life expectancy, or as Humphra so neatly put it in ’23, ‘a Streetka named Retire’.
The Ka was great fun and cornered quite well but it didn't have any guts whatsoever, it was actually dangerous. Overtaking a lorry had to be planned, build up speed and pull out at the last minute, as soon as your out of the wind protection created by the lorry you start scrubbing off speed and you quickly needed to decide whether you need to abort!
Air conditioning was a nice little extra but you couldn't really use it as it used vital engine power and you could actually feel it sapping power.
Rust was the killer for all of the KA models, my car was only 9 years old when it looks like it failed it's final MOT (14 major rust related failures) after covering just 81,000 miles.
Had a 54 plate 1.3 with the Duratec which was so, so much better than the Endura engine. Loved it but even after 3 years and 56k miles it was getting tired. It somehow survived for 12 years before failing spectacularly on rust everywhere! The age of the underlying design being essentially Mk3 Fiesta really shows as they get old.
As for Kas in general, I had a Ka hire car for a couple of days and loved the handling, if only it had more power..... i ended up doing that forwards - backwards pulling on the steering wheel, like I'm sure we've all done when there's not enough acceleration, as if that action would somehow add some!
Though I've never actually owned a Ka or StreetKa, I have spent time over the years idly looking at ads for ones for sale, and building an impression that they like to rust. I've also seen some modded ones that IMHO have improved the looks.
As for this one, fair credit for making it this far! Hopefully someone will take it on and love it and help it carry on for many more years.
The Ka was great fun and cornered quite well but it didn't have any guts whatsoever, it was actually dangerous. Overtaking a lorry had to be planned, build up speed and pull out at the last minute, as soon as your out of the wind protection created by the lorry you start scrubbing off speed and you quickly needed to decide whether you need to abort!
Air conditioning was a nice little extra but you couldn't really use it as it used vital engine power and you could actually feel it sapping power.
Rust was the killer for all of the KA models, my car was only 9 years old when it looks like it failed it's final MOT (14 major rust related failures) after covering just 81,000 miles.
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