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Our Fleet Test Drive: Ford Mondeo estate - 1st Report Update
Date: 04 March 2008 | Author: Tristan Young
We're taking a liking to the Mondeo's cruise control...
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Main Report - 20 February 2008
The whole point of a long-term test is to see what a car is like to live with daily over an extended period, while with a short-term test we take a snapshot of how a car drives and how much it's expected to cost on a per-mile basis.
When we first drove the new Ford Mondeo mid-2007 we were mightily impressed. The car was bigger and better than before with a fine driving experience, expected lower running costs and higher levels of equipment, coupled to a promise of even better quality standards.
BusinessCar readers drew the same conclusion, and at the start of this year you voted the Mondeo our Business Car of the Year.
So expectations were high when our long-term Mondeo 2.0 TDCi Titanium X estate arrived. We'd opted for diesel, because most sales will be diesel, and we'd chosen estate because we'll find it the most useful, as several of the team have families.
As for the pricey Titanium X trim [1], we picked this because it offers all the new technology and equipment that Ford has been boasting about in its launch material, including bendy headlights, clever trip computer, anti-skid control and twin zone climate control. For good measure we also optioned adaptive cruise control (£1000), Bluetooth (£150), DVD satnav (£1200), metallic paint (£350), front and rear parking sensors (£400), heated [2] and cooled front seats (£100), privacy glass (£150) and [3] roof rails (£150). All this brought the price to a whopping £26,595 - probably not the best move for residuals, but great to test.
Unfortunately, our car didn't listen to Ford's claims of improved quality. With less than 100 miles on the clock and only a couple of days in our hands it failed to start one morning.
The car's inclusive AA cover was put to use and car was started, only for it to fail to start again a few days later.
We called our nearest dealer Evans Halshaw in Bexley who couldn't book the car in for a week, but said we could leave the car with them and if a slot opened up they'd look at the car.
We called the AA again to get the car restarted and took the car to the dealer.
Not having heard anything for four working days after the car's official booking slot we called to find out what was going on. Evans Halshaw couldn't find anything wrong with the car despite testing it every day. The advice given was that if it happened again we weren't to let the AA reset the car's electronics, but just to get them to recover the car to the dealer who would then see if a fault code was still on the car's electronic memory.
Of course, the car's been fine since and has been rapidly putting on the miles, and is nearly at 1000. Let's hope we've seen the last of the electronic niggles.
