While I really did like the car in many ways, I just never really liked it. I see why I liked it when I bought it on May 8th 2020. Even though Mondeos are a dime a dozen in Denmark, it looks fairly good and the color is nice. Furthermore this one came with a body kit of some sort – I don’t know if it was OEM or not. Inside it had a snappy looking interior with pleasant looking bolstered seats that were very comfortable. It had tinted windows in the back for the kids which was nice on a hot summer day. The trunk is huge on these and the handling is really, really good for a FWD car of this size. But…
There were things about it I wasn’t that pleased with: this one was the Titanium model which among other things meant it came with a little screen in the instrument cluster. But that screen did nothing more than what two lines of text did in my previous Ford Focus’ display – it was just bigger and in color.
Another thing I didn’t like was that it was lowered. I did not notice this until after I got the car. It made it a great handler, but it also made it a poor city car. My driveway has a rather steep curb meaning I could only reverse in or it would scrape. And there are speed bumps throughout my neighborhood – KKKKRRRSSSSJJJHHH!!! – KKKKRRRSSSSJJJHHH!!! – KKKKRRRSSSSJJJHHH!!! (as Tom Wolfe would put it). And the lowered suspension was also stiffer – I really don’t know why I didn’t notice on the test drive. This car’s raison d’être was to be a comfortable family car, and for that purpose nobody wants a stiff suspension.
But those I could live with. Stuff I struggled with was the fact that during winter, the opening mechanism in the doors would freeze in a noose somewhere inside the door (from what I could read online). In cold weather the windows would also freeze stuck around the edge. So you would sit inside the car in the morning wanting to get out. Then you would pull the door handle to no effect, and then the fix would typically be to roll the window down and use the outside door handle. But the window would be stuck, and guess what: so would you. That is just an inexcusably poor and dangerous design.
Furthermore, there was a funny smell you could sometimes smell inside the car – the sweet scent of gasoline. Add to that the fact that you’re stuck inside the car and you start to feel like you’re driving a Pinto rather than a Mondeo.
And about that gasoline smell, that was from a cracked fuel pipe with numerous bends made out of brittle plastic. It spewed gasoline over the engine and it cracked in not one place but in two. If Ford had saved the money on the useless screen, I’m sure they could have splurged two dollars on a durable fuel pipe.
It comes back to one of my main grievances with many new cars summed up in the term “perceived quality”. This Mondeo was really nice on the perceived quality parameter, but fell through completely on the actual quality parameter.
Oh, and the driveline was weird in the sense that in normal driving it would feel fine and like you had plenty of power, but when you actually reached for it, it would go “nope, we’re fresh out.” It had just enough power and the gearing was juuuust fine. But no more. To me a car feels nice and luxurious when it offers stuff you know is there but that you rarely use. This one did not have that.
So long story short, I grew weary of it. We paid 59,000 DKK for it (about 8,500 USD) and it looked really nice, so it was good enough that I needed to take care of it. But since I did not love it, I did not really want to. At this price point, not taking care of it would mean throwing too much money away, but taking good care of it would not necessarily be justified by its value. I needed to solve that paradox.
You can basically go two ways to solve this: Buy something nice enough that’s it’s worth taking proper care of, or buy something worn enough that it doesn’t matter if you fix every little thing that goes wrong.
Even though I was making significantly more than when we bought the Mondeo one year prior, I still don’t like using that much of my income paying for the depreciation, so my response to this conundrum was to go cheap: Sell this one and buy something cheaper that is a bit scruffy but of actual quality, so that it can be driven into the ground and when it’s time for replacement or junkyard, it does not represent a value I cannot accept throwing away.
My wife was more or less onboard with this idea, though, as we will see in the next installment, things did not exactly go as planned.
I ended up selling it on the 17th of June 2021 after getting a year of decent service out of it. It sold for 54,000 DKK (7,800 USD) meaning a very acceptable depreciation of around 700 USD at today’s exchange rate. However, various repairs and maintenance items (I swapped some solenoids in the engine bay, it got new rear rotors and calipers, a new, heated windscreen and various bits and pieces) ended up at 2,500 USD on top of that so it was not exactly cheap to own – but not crazy expensive either. Here it is leaving with its new owner:
For my next car I wanted something I really liked. It would mean a compromise on some parameters as we were going to go cheap – and maybe we went a compromise too far. But for the first time since my Alfa Romeo 75, I got something I thought was really cool.
My previous COALs:
1988 Alfa Romeo 75 2.0 Twin Spark
2007 Ford Focus 1.8 TDCI Trend Collection Wagon
I’ve seen a lot of “lowered” vehicles on-line (mostly on BaT) but where I live they are hard to find in regular use.
In my (old timer) opinion, they look wrong.
A lowered suspension and maybe big 20 inch (or more) wheels with thin rim protector tires makes a vehicle an easy target for very expensive damage, mostly from post-winter pot holes, but also from (as you mentioned) speed bumps and various steep driveway entry and exit aprons.
I understand the concept of how a lowered suspension and low side wall tires might make driving and steering more responsive under some conditions, but I’m not sure what those conditions are exactly, and how often a driver might experience those conditions outside of a track day.
But to some, I guess it’s the look that counts, expenses be damned.
Now, about those extreme negative camber crazies …
I totally get it on “perceived” vs actual quality. I have a 2016 Subaru Forester XT owned since new. In the last 6 months (120,000 – 137,000 kms) it has needed all 4 wheel bearings, both lower ball joints, a rear control arm, a rear wheel speed sensor and now the drive belt tensioner. Those bearings are $300 each and 8 hrs an end. Not the actual quality I was expecting from a Subaru and it turns out several of these are known issues with this generation of Subarus. No more Subarus for us.
Same here. 2012 Subaru Forester with 137K miles. The engine has been rebult 3x by Subaru (under warranty) The service deartment was apprehensive about doing my third, but sentiments changed by saying in the crowded service foyer that my Jaguar is more reliable than my Subaru (I actually have never own a Jaguar though, it was just a little white lie for emphasis) Anyway based on the sounds it’s making, it is on its way out again. Known issues. I won’t have another Subaru.
I totally get what you say about the power. In my first car I often had to use the accelerator as an on/off switch. Full throttle was a must to get up the hill out of town. The last car I drove, while still a family car, had more than we ever needed, even for towing. The first time I got into it I was amazed at the power compared to the vehicle it replaced. While it’s not nice to be in a situation where the car says “nope we’re fresh out!”, there is such a thing as overkill.
We have Mondeos in Australia. Your car doesn’t look lowered; I wouldn’t have picked it either. Subtle.
Despite your mixed experience with the Mondeo, I’m reading this from my seat in the US thinking yep, another example of how we aren’t allowed to have nice things, especially when said nice things are called “wagons.”
(Yes, we briefly had the Jaguar X-Type wagon, which was at least somewhat Mondeo-derived, but try and find one today).
We have our absurd CAFE regulatory scheme to blame for the disappearance of truly compact pickups and affordable wagons in the US, the boom in SUVs/CUVs as their effective successors, and why the few wagons we do still get tend to be from upscale marques that can justify the price premium covering their CAFE penalty:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/10/how-cafe-killed-compact-trucks-and-station-wagons/
As a Ford guy, I’m disappointed that your ownership experience wasn’t all you wanted. Me being in the U.S., I’ve been tempted by the Mondeo wagon (that we don’t get) for more than 20 years–I guess I could import a 1998 nowadays, but that’s hard to rationalize…
Here’s hoping the Alfa works out well!