[AlanD]

Well.....

I drove an XR6 during after we took delivery of our Mondeo, and, on balance, I'm glad that our wish for a diesel engined car guided us to the Mondeo (we had driven a Mk3 diesel in the UK and that car made a very good impression). We would probably have bought a Falcon IF there was a diesel engine option.

The Mondeo is a big car, in terms of interior space it is larger than a Falcon, and based on our experience better screwed together.

Our car has had no faults, excepting one due to dealer hamfistedness, in 60,000 km of distance. It is very economical - our long term average is 6.5 litres/100km at an average speed of 60 km/hour - live in a regional area and do a lot of highway km.

If the i40 is a better car then it must be very, very good indeed

Another factor is that the plant where our car was built (Gent, Belgium) got scheduled for shut down in 2013 and Ford intended to assemble the Mondeo in Valencia, Spain starting in 2014, but I am not sure if this has happened yet.

Senior executives need to learn a fundamental lesson, which is that if you forecast a shut down the morale of the workers gets a hammering and the quality of the product starts to suffer, I suspect that the Mondeos referred to Ducati's post might have fallen into this situation.

A further problem is dealers, bluntly, in my experience, they are not well versed with imported ford models. In our case they broke our car at the 3,000 courtesy service. The problem did not keep it off the road, but it was a different dealer that got the fix done at the 15,000 km service. Other than this the car has been faultless.

Reading the addition to OPE126's post, I'm not surprised if there have been some transmission unit problems, based on the description. There is an old engineering maxim, which is the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and since our car has an "old fashioned" straight forward transmission might be a reason for lack of problems.

Thankfully, we don't have to worry about car replacement for a couple of years, perhaps by then Ford will have ironed out the bugs and have gotten the Valencia Plant working like the Gent Plant used to.

Further, we deliberately bought the sedan version, based on our experience with a TX5 Hatch. That car had many rattles and squeaks from the hatch "door" as the seals wore and we preferred to avoid a potential repeat. The parcel shelf also stiffens up the car's back end. (The boot, by the way is huge, pity Ford Oz discontinued the importation of the sedan).

Cheers