Road Test: Ford Mondeo 2.5 V6 5dr

The front seats are terrific, and there's room to stretch in the back - something the 3-Series and the like definitely don't offer. The estate's boot is chest of drawers size. Oddly though, you don't get roof bars as standard.

You get a lot of other kit though. Every Mondeo in the launch range, which begins with a £15k 1.6 petrol, gets cruise control, aircon, ESP and seven airbags including one under the steering column.

Here's a clever idea. There's no fuel cap. You pop open the flap in the body and there's a hole, with a blanking shutter just behind it.

Say you've got a petrol Mondeo, you can't fill it with diesel because a diesel pump nozzle is bigger diameter and won't fit the hold. But say you've got a diesel Mondeo; the small-diameter nozzle of a petrol pump doesn't fit either because it won't push apart the little levers that open the shutter. So for a start you can't put the wrong fuel in, and for a second thing you don't have to handle a fuel cap, and will never drive off with it on the roof of the car.

That sort of careful touch can really help you to build a good relationship with your car. But this is an easy car to fall for anyway. It does so much so well.

The paradox is, the five-cylinder Mondeo is only going to be driven by Ford management, Ford dealers and motoring journalists. Ford knows no one will buy it because of the stranglehold of the prestige brands. And if everyone wants a new BMW or Mercedes or Audi, as sure as night follows day everyone in the second-hand market also wants one of those three.

So Mondeos depreciate, which means this temptingly priced Titanium X 2.5 will actually cost you a lot more to run than the 320i Touring that costs similar cash new. Oh dear. Buy a Mondeo only if it's with your boss's money.

Still, Ford does now have a good way to fight depreciation. In the past the production line in Belgium built only Mondeo, so whenever real-life demand went soft they had to keep the line busy by selling it at huge discounts to fleets, which is catastrophic for used values.

Now the line also builds the Galaxy and the hot-selling S-Max, which means Ford can defer the day it has to over-supply the Mondeo into the discount bloodbath. But we've heard similar promises before from Ford's mass-market competitors, and it usually hasn't worked.

There's a bigger reservation about the new Mondeo. The 1.6 and 1.8 engines, even the 2.0 petrol probably, are going to have their work cut out to haul such a weighty car along. Interestingly, Ford hasn't yet fielded any of the small engines for us to sample.

Other than that, the news is all positive. OK, so no one's getting excited about the new Mondeo. But maybe they should.