The Ford Mondeo is on its last legs in its current form. Ford is testing a successor, a car with which the brand takes a different tack than we are used to. The successor to the Mondeo will be a model in which the brand injects a strong dose of cross-DNA.
The time when a Ford Mondeo is a conventional sedan, hatchback or station wagon will soon seem over for good. The conventional D segment is struggling. The car market prefers SUVs and crossovers to large sedans, hatchbacks and station wagons. This prompts Citroën to make the new C5 a mishmash of various body styles and the Ford Mondeo is also succeeded by a model that can be called neither a sedan nor a station wagon. This is evident from a first set of spy photos of the successor to the old trusted Mondeo.
Ford Mondeo successor
This set of spy photos shows a wattle of a wrapped Ford, a car that is still very fanatically covered with camouflage material. Until the B-pillar, the body of the snapped test specimen shows similarities with the Mondeo as we know it. The test car has a relatively high but slightly sloping nose in which apparently a large, almost Mustang-like grille together with flat headlights determine the image. The roofline continues far back, but appears to be relatively steep from the B-pillar. The black ‘superstructure’ on the back has to be ignored, underneath it is a fairly flat rear window and a truncated buttocks in the style of cars like BMW’s 6-series Gran Turismo. Nice detail: the Mondeo successor gets recessed handles.
Although the new Mondeo is less of an SUV than, for example, the Mustang Mach-E, the Mondeo undergoes a violent metamorphosis during its generation change. It remains to be seen whether the Mondeo successor will be called Mondeo again. Don’t be surprised if Ford dusts off the name ‘Evos’, applied in 2011 to a study model that anticipated the current Mondeo. Although it is also possible that Ford will add ‘Active’ to the model name Mondeo. Whatever the Mondeo successor will be called, it will be electrified anyway. Count on a range of mild hybrid powertrains, but certainly also on a plug-in hybrid variant. Under the skin, we expect to encounter a version of the C2 platform that Ford introduced on the current Focus and that also offers support to cars like the Kuga, Bronco Sport and the Corsair from Ford’s premium brand Lincoln. We expect a disclosure this year.
Ford Mondeo in the Netherlands
Since the Dutch market launch of Sierra’s successor Mondeo in 1993, almost 174,000 units have been sold in our country – spread over four generations. This has made it the most popular Ford in our country since 1983 after cars such as the Escort, Fiesta and Focus. The sales figures that the Mondeo managed to score in its first ten years, Ford has later hardly managed to match. Where an average of more than 10,000 Mondeos were sold per year between 1993 and 2003, the annual sales counter only rose above 2,500 once after 2011. After 2017, the 1,000 units was not even achieved anymore. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, only 790, 772 and 542 Mondeos were sold consecutively.
Ford Mondeo (1993)