The Mondeo TD

“L

ucy,” or “the DervMobile,” was a faithful companion for over 40,000 miles (even if technically she was the second DervMobile of my driving career).

We got off to a bad start; I picked her up on the Thursday, and that night the battery died on me. She spent all of Friday in the dealership, only for them to tell me she needed a new battery. The first cold snap, I discovered that the glow plugs needed replacing. It’s quite common for diesels to behave like this and given that she had covered 80,000 miles on the one set, I was not too bothered by this.

After the glowplugs were replaced, she never missed a beat and she never let me down.

Compared with the Cinquecento she replaced, the Mondeo was a far more serious car. She didn’t have the same sense of Italian urgency about the city /cough/ but she did feel significantly quicker once you get out of the urban crawl. The seats and driving position were excellent, whilst the driver environment was also top notch: the front of the Mondeo is a comfortable place to spend four hours and I should know because I did it often enough. The Mondeo was in her element on a long motorway drive, where if you stuck to the speed limit she could return over fifty to the gallon.

In the city, the Mondeo suffered from the typical response in first gear that all similar generation turbodiesels have: all or nothing. This made moving off in a smooth but swift manner quite difficult. On the hoof and in the upper gears, the Mondeo TD’s performance was much better. Of course, Lucy had the “diesel lope” ability and rarely required a down-change to climb a steep gradient.

Initially, fuel economy was rather disappointing, hovering in the low forties, but probably because I was enjoying the turbocharger boost after the Cinquecento. In the second year, the average fuel economy was quite a bit higher than the first, and in the opening months of the third year with the car, the average economy crept up to 46 mpg. The overall average was just under 45 mpg, which I was happy with given the weight of the Mondeo and the fact that she used a second generation, indirect injection turbodiesel engine.

My experiences of the PSA XUD engine (in the Peugeot 306 / 405 / 406, Xantia and ZX) and the Isuzu unit (used in the Astra and Cavalier and a relative of the Saab’s TiD) showed this to be competitive if not outstanding.

Like the Cinquecento, fold down the rear seats and you have a very spacious cargo hold. It was the Mondeo that took my wife, our Best Man and I, plus enough luggage to sink the QE2 (sorry darling!) back from the airport. We moved house four times with the assistance of the Mondeo.

The Mondeo has a reputation for being an unreliable and unloved car. Mine was always serviced at a Ford dealership, and never gave me any trouble. She certainly didn’t drive like she had covered 108,000 miles and there were no squeaks or rattles from the car - commendable in any high mileage diesel. She was on the original clutch, too, which says something for how she was treated both before and during my ownership.

Why did we change the car? We moved to York, a city renowned for being unfriendly towards cars, and had to cope with on-street parking. And our mileage halved overnight (at least, that was the theory) so our longer drives were now an hour, rather than three. So our requirement for a car biased towards long distance cruising was much reduced. Oh, and we wanted something with air conditioning and anti-lock brakes.

Indeed, if Lucy possessed air conditioning and anti lock brakes, we probably wouldn’t have changed her for Kermit and this web site would be about Dervy and Lucy’s adventures!

Even so, I did mourn the passing of the DervMobile, but the brilliance of her replacement, the Ka, has helped ease the pain!

I liked the Mondeo’s turbocharger, her handling and ride, spacious interior, large fuel tank (giving her a 650+ mile range on a long haul) and how relaxing and comfortable the interior was.

I disliked the engine’s turbocharger lag in cities, that she didn’t have ABS or air conditioning and the fact that she didn’t produce all that much soot.

We averaged 44·4 mpg over 34,500 miles (see chart).

I had a few problems, most of which are not really the car’s fault, but these included a duff battery the first two days of owning the car, glow plugs replaced the first winter (neither really the car’s fault), replaced a leaking fuel solenoid.