back to article Mondeo Man turns into mutant electrical beauty: Ford Mondeo Hybrid

Considering the number of Toyota hybrids that you see on British roads, it’s surprising that, despite Ford having offered a range of the things to the North American market since 2009, the new Mondeo Hybrid is the first one Uncle Henry has punted on this side of the pond. mondeo_hero_image Ford's new Mondeo Hybrid. A touch …

  1. Lysenko

    What??

    "To start with the fuel tank looses 9.5 litres"

    That is one hell of a big fuel leak! The thing is clearly a death trap. I hope you can substantiate this allegation before Ford contact Sue, Grabbit & Runne.

  2. Steve K

    "£25,295" - is that inclusive of the Government grant?

    60mpg is not that impressive really - I get around that from my (2005) A4 2.0 TDI, but maybe the Mondeo wins on emissions.

    Steve

    1. Steve Todd

      No government grant for hybrids. You need a pure electric or plug in hybrid for that.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Derv version petrol

      "60mpg is not that impressive really - I get around that from my (2005) A4 2.0 TDI, but maybe the Mondeo wins on emissions."

      Derv has about 10% more density than petrol - buying a liquid by volume is convenient but conceals the fact that a gallon of petrol is only 90% as much fuel as a gallon of Derv. As, 20 years ago, Diesels had about 25% better volumetric fuel consumption than petrol engines, this is a truly remarkable achievement.

      1. Lars Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Derv version petrol

        " this is a truly remarkable achievement." Yes indeed, nobody would run anything big, like ships or trains and things like that on petrol engines. to quote http://www.gizmag.com/go/3263/

        "If the Seven Wonders of the World was updated for the 21 st century, the Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine could be a contender. If you are a student of the internal combustion engine in all its wonderous configurations, then feast your eyes on this set of numbers which outline the truly astounding engineering feat. It is the most powerful and most efficient engine in the world today."

        You can run a diesel on almost anything, like "shit". There are pig farms who get all the energy they need from the shit, and in some countries they are allowed to sell the energy the don't need. (Not that you cannot run a petrol engine on wood as some of us remember and some actually do to day).

        Astonishing breakthroughs have lately been made regarding emissions but that technology is, to day, only possible when the need for space and weight are less of a problem, and of course there has to be regulations demanding it too.

        1. JulieM Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: Derv version petrol

          Mmmmm, engine pr0n!

          Have an upvote.

  3. K

    The body looks nice

    But the alloys look like they were taken from a Ka.

    If you got a sleek looking design, it needs appropriately sized alloys to finish it off.

    Perhaps its just the camera angles.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The body looks nice

      I don't understand why the Mondeo Hybrid has 16" wheels in the EU when the standard fitment in the US is 17" wheels for the Fusion Hybrid (with an option for 18" wheels with certain packages). The 16" wheels on the Mondeo Hybrid appear to be the base wheel on the 2015-16 petrol base Fusion S.

  4. Omgwtfbbqtime

    Not bad

    Make an estate variant and I'll have one.

    1. Gordon 10
      Thumb Down

      Re: Not bad

      I strongly suggest that ford will fusck it up by not making either a hatch or estate variant.

  5. JP19

    1.4kWh battery?

    Sheesh - giving an electric range of about 3 miles and less than 1 minute of flat out electric motor.

    Hybrids don't make a lot of sense but the ones that make the most are plugins allowing the first 20 or 30 miles of each journey to be on (artificially) cheap and (pretend) green electricity while avoiding the cost of a large battery and having to lug it around everywhere.

    Fuel economy wobbling round on its hard skinny tyres is far from impressive hard to see the point of this car although at least it isn't hugely expensive.

  6. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    Nothing was copied from the clever Japanese boy

    Well, because it was copied from the clever French one.This looks like the stuff Peugeout has been packing into the recent models for a third year now.

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      Re: Nothing was copied from the clever Japanese boy

      Oh dear God I would hope not!

    2. TeeCee Gold badge
      WTF?

      Re: Nothing was copied from the clever Japanese boy

      What? The same Peugeot whose hybrids feature diesel drive at the front and leccy at the rear?

      This has got as much in common with an F1 KERS system as that....... i.e. sod all.

      Just 'cos Fords are tied into a long deal to buy that monumentally godawful PSA diesel powerplant doesn't mean they want anything else from that quarter

  7. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

    0-62 sprint takes 9.5 seconds and the top speed is 116mph

    Considering the target market, I don't either of those numbers are especially relevant.

    I have to agree on the fuel economy though. On longer trips I've been getting far better than 49mpg in diesel cars for some years now. I had a courtesy car a few weeks back. It was a Kia Sportage and I had a busy day involving about 400 miles driving, 2/3rds of which was non-motorway. Being a courtesy car I needed to be back at the garage same day so I was in a hurry. 1.7l diesel, hurrying on country roads, finishing off with a 70mph run back up the motorway, no attempts to be "green" by me and I still got 54mpg on the day.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 0-62 sprint takes 9.5 seconds and the top speed is 116mph

      B.S.

  8. Shady

    Aston Martin?

    Is it just me, or are Ford's attempts to make their cars look like Aston Martin's only slightly better than Wesley Snipes attempts to make his Beetle look like a Rolls Royce?

  9. Ged Perryman

    White Elephant

    I spoke to a salesman in a Ford dealership about this car a few weeks ago. I've bought a couple of cars from him before and he knew I was genuinely interested in this model - perhaps that is why he was so candid.

    He told me the car was a white elephant and Ford weren't expecting to sell many at all...

    The gist of it was that the Mondeo is not built for urban driving as the article mentions and once you are on the Motorway you are effectively driving a 2.0L petrol engine, only with a great big heavy battery pack killing the fuel economy.

    The wheels/tires look terrible on this model because the alloys are smaller than standard to improve the rolling resistance. The same as on the EcoTech model (but not to be confused with the the EcoBoost engine).

    I was told that the only reason Ford have this model in the UK is because they get a tax break for having a Hybrid model in the range - regardless of the quantity they sell...

    I still think the car looks stunning and am planning on ordering one in the next couple of weeks, but it won't be a Hybrid!!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: White Elephant

      "smaller than standard to improve the rolling resistance."

      Is that right? I thought it was the opposite - big wheels have less rolling resistance because the angle of attack to road irregularities is lower. This is why horse drawn carts had huge wheels. Of course the footprint is bigger for the same tyre width, but the surface pressure is then lower so the distortion of the rubber should be less.

      Genuine question, can anyone explain?

      1. Dave 126

        Re: White Elephant

        Short answer: Smaller wheels have greater rolling resistance, but they require less energy to accelerate.

        Long answer: Imagine a polished metal wheel on a glass surface - no deformation. The actual area of contact is nearly zero, a point. The direction of movement of the wheel at this point of contact is tangential to the wheel and parallel to the ground, so the movement is in the direction that we want the vehicle to travel. This scenario is cleanly impossible, an ideal from a text book.

        Now add deformation. A rubber pneumatic tyre. We need it for traction. Our perfect circle now has a flattened area on the bottom. The direction of the wheel's movement at the point the wheel meets the ground is no longer parallel to the ground. This results in road noise and heating of the tyre. Now, for the same area of tyre-road contact, a larger wheel will result in the motion of the wheel being closer to parallel to the road.

        Acceleration: bigger wheels have more angular momentum, weight for weight, than smaller wheels. A child on a roundabout knows that if they starting spinning whilst hanging out, they spin much faster when they pull their mass in towards the centre of the roundabout. Effectivily they start as a big wheel, and become a small wheel of the same weight - in order to preserve the angular momentum the speed up. In reality, big wheels will also be heavier than small wheels because otherwise they would break more easily.

        So, big wheels reduce the energy you waste in friction. If we had 100% efficient (you can never have 100% efficiency!) regenerative breaking in electric vehicles, the energy used to accelerate bigger heavier wheels wouldn't be wasted since it would be reclaimed when the vehicle decelerated - just as energy can be stored in flywheels.

        1. Ged Perryman

          Re: White Elephant

          Bad choice of words from someone who doesn't know the science and I also got the model name wrong... Should have been ECOnetic rather than EcoTech.

          All I know is that these small alloys/big tyres (They look a little like the ones off Noddy's car) are on this model and the ECOnetic model... Something to do with the green credentials - see Dave 126 for an explanation why :-)

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: White Elephant

          Dave 126, thanks for your post which actually confirms what I suspected but fills in the details.

          One thing though - please fix your spellchecker. It's brakes and braking where controlled vehicle deceleration is concerned. Breaks is for uncontrolled deceleration.

      2. JP19

        Re: White Elephant

        "big wheels have less rolling resistance"

        The wheels are the same size anyway and the other post talking about rotational kinetic energy is drivel for that reason and more so because the rotational kinetic energy of the wheels is of the same order as their linear kinetic energy and almost trivial compared to the linear kinetic energy of the whole vehicle.

        I know bugger all about eco tyres but forming the flat contact patch on a higher profile tyre probably requires less overall deformation of the rubber.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: White Elephant

          "but forming the flat contact patch on a higher profile tyre"

          If the tyre has the same overall outer diameter, and the width is the same, isn't the profile irrelevant unless the walls flex? I thought that one reason for large diameter low profile tyres is that wheels are actually lighter than tyres, so the combination of a big wheel and low profile tyre is lighter overall than a small wheel and a high profile tyre. But low profile tyres are obviously less resilient and, in the hands of bad drivers, result in more kerb damage to wheels and a higher risk of unplanned deflation on hitting a stone or similar object. The driver of the car with the low profile tyres is presumed more likely to make use of the improved handling and so wears out tyres faster; hybrid drivers tend not to do this.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: White Elephant

        Sssshhhh... don't try explaining anything technical to a Ford owner, else they'll wake up and wonder what the fuck they're doing buying Fords!

    2. Fusion Owner

      Re: White Elephant

      Unfortunately, I do not think that your salesman knows what he is talking about. I had a 2015 Fusion Hybrid that I turned in with 11,000 miles for a 2017 Fusion Hybrid. At the time I turned the car in, my over all fuel mileage was 50.2 miles per US gallon, which is not bad considering that the car was rated for 42 mpg. My driving was a combination of suburban, highway/motorway and city center driving into Washington, DC on a daily basis. The car actually did better if I drove it on the highway and maintained a speed of 55 - 60 MPH.

      In the US, the Fusion Hybrid is fairly popular in spite of low gas prices. For the year ending December 2016, 33,648 Fusion Hybrids were sold in the US, up from 24,681 the year prior (representing a 10.37 share of the US market for hybrids). So far, for Calendar Year 2017, 20,169 Fusion Hybrids have been delivered as of April 30, 2017. Obviously, Ford must be doing something right if it has the second most popular hybrid so far this year in the US.

  10. TeeCee Gold badge
    Meh

    Looks like an Aston

    In exactly the same way that Cubic Zirconia looks like Diamond. That is that anyone with any taste at all would spot it for the cheap and nasty knockoff immediately.

    1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

      Bad example. Zirconia is a much prettier rock than diamond and isn't tainted by the dubious moral decisions of a monopoly supplier forcing an artificially high price through artificial supply restriction. So it's not a "cheap knockoff", it's an arguably superior product at a much more reasonable price.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

          That's nice.

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. returnmyjedi

    I had a 1.6 diesel Mondeo (previous model) as a lease car a couple of years ago whilst I waited for my company one to arrive and it managed an mpg in the mid 60s without any particular effort on my behalf. Aside from the snug sense of self satisfaction and the ability to sneak up on other road users I really cannot see the benefits of a hybrid over an oil burner (aside from a few less CO2s and NOXs emitted, natch).

    1. Lars Silver badge
      Happy

      "(aside from a few less CO2s and NOXs emitted, natch)." I think you nailed it there in a way as that is the reason for cars like that, natch.

  12. BobRocket

    Styling

    It probably looks reminiscent of a Jag/Aston because Ford owned both those brands in the not too distant past.

    I have a question about the centre console, does it have two cup holders in the lid that when folded fully back are supposed to be horizontal but because of the upholstery on the back seat are angled at 20 degrees (making them useless). I only ask because I used to have a mondeo, never again.

    It wasn't my choice (a company car) but it looked ok on a cursory glance, in use it was bloody awful.

    It had a nicely rounded dash that would accelerate any loose objects straight out of the passenger window if it was open and a rev limiter that when it kicked in would lose power until the revs had dropped back below a (very low) limit.

    This was a particularly interesting feature to discover halfway through overtaking a big truck, I was glad to get rid of it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Styling

      And now you know why trucks spend ages trying to pass one another...

      Pity the poor truckers.

      1. Sir Runcible Spoon

        Re: Styling

        I've always thought that to help reduce congestion on the roads that trucks should be allowed a 'booster' button that can be used once every 30 mins (or whatever is deemed most efficient) in order to be able to quiclly pass another truck and get back into the inside lane - especially useful on dual carriageways I would think.

        The number of times you see a tail-back forming behind two lorries trying to out-drag one another isn't funny.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Styling

          How about the moron trucker on the inside lane backed off for 30 seconds to allow the overtaking truck to pass?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Styling

            You've never driven a truck or you'd understand why that's a stupid thing to say.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's still a (modern) Mondeo

    Underpowered and slug-like.

    Even the full petrol engine variants are gutless.

    Now, put a 2.5 V6 in it and then we'll see.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's still a (modern) Mondeo

      So my XR5/ 2.5t bluefinned 270bhp petrol mondeo is "slug like"?

      Talking bollocks.

  14. Jock in a Frock

    Not a hybrid, but....

    ... I have a 1.6 TDCi Hatchback on order in Ruby Red, should be with me in June. Can't wait, the car looks stunning. Budget wouldn't stretch to the 2.0L diesel, but I'm happy with the fuel economy figures, and anyway, me and the missus need to slow down a bit as we get older!

  15. 2Fat2Bald

    Company Cars....

    The only way this thing is going to make sense is as a company car. 50mpg (in round figures) isn't that impressive, but don't forget it's 50mpg on Petrol, not diesel, and Petrol is a little cheaper. Not much, granted, but it's there. However it's savings in BIK tax aren't bad - although not that much better than a eco-diesel.

    Most company cars are actually company funded private cars, and the employees get some say in what they get. Mostly they'd prefer an A4 or 3-Series to a Ford-branded car. Pure brand snobbery, but there it is. And lot of company car drivers (sales, tech reps) need a big boot - so this is not much cop.

    One thing that does promote hybrids is the eco-conscious image. but this looks like any other Mondeo, so unlike a Prius it doesn't do the company or driver any favours there....

    I like it - but I don't think many other people will.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meanwhile, Tesla...

    humongous boot, frunk, 200 mile range...

    Yeah, the only thing that sucks on a Tesla is the range, and the EV recharging paradigm...er... a wall socket wherever.

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