“I don’t know what I’d go for if I didn’t have the Fiesta,” said Karen Fox, a civil servant in Edinburgh. She is due to pick up her fourth version of the model on Saturday, but it is likely to be her last: Ford on Wednesday confirmed it will end production of the UK’s all-time bestselling car next June.

The model’s end will become only the latest symbol of the shift from internal combustion engines to batteries: the factory in Cologne, Germany, where the last Fiestas are being made will switch to producing two new electric models.

During the 47 years since the first Fiestas rolled off the production line at Ford’s factory in Valencia, Spain, more than 22m have been sold around the world. Of those, 4.8m were in the UK, where the Fiesta was the top-selling model for 12 years in a row from 2009 to 2020.

The US carmaker first launched the Fiesta in 1976 , as engineering teams rushed to bring out smaller, more efficient cars in response to a prior energy crisis. Production started in the UK a year later, at Dagenham. It was here that the actor Idris Elba worked nights for two years before finding stardom. The plant now makes only diesel engines, having produced its last Fiesta in 2002.

The Fiesta (“party”, in Spanish) was never glamorous, but it was hugely popular through seven iterations. The Internet Movie Car Database lists more than 4,000 appearances in films. Yet the Fiesta was almost always in the background rather than the starring role, although it did have brushes with fame. Bridget Jones actor Renée Zellwegger was said to drive a Fiesta, while Roger Moore posed for a picture with an early model while filming 1977’s James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me – although it would take a keen-eyed car buff to spot it behind the Lotus Espirit that provided the film’s main automotive interest.

Yet the car could still set pulses racing. Stephen Millings, a retired retail manager from Belfast, bought a Mk1 Fiesta XR2 a few years after the car’s launch, in 1982.

“I was a boy racer,” he said. “The car drove like a proverbial roller skate, the handling was superb and you could easily navigate roundabouts well in excess of current speed limits.”

Alex Buttle, co-founder of secondhand car website Motorway.co.uk, said the Fiesta represents a “consistently significant proportion” of the cars customers sell on its platform, and prices have held up relatively well.

“The Fiesta may have been given the chop by Ford but it’s alive and kicking in the used-car market,” Buttle said. “It has been a staple super mini for years” and is a “modern-day classic”, he added.

Car brands have for the most part opted to launch electric vehicles under new nameplates rather than updating existing models. Ford is in the middle of a clearout: it also on Wednesday announced the end of production in Valencia of the S-MAX and Galaxy multi-purpose vehicles – what Americans call minivans – in April 2023. The Mondeo, the symbol of aspirational swing voters during Tony Blair’s premiership, was axed last year. The bigger Focus could also face the axe soon.