Verpraet reckons the Mondeo aces Parry-Jones’s famous 20-metre test, because the driving position is great and the controls are easy and intuitive – both things you notice before you’re out of first gear. “It can’t help feeling old because of the shape, colour, materials, low waistline and vast glass area,” he added, “but you can row it along in ordinary traffic and feel very satisfied.”
Prior is a bit worried for the Mondeo, though. “It’s showing little sign of moving from the old banger phase and into its classic time,” he said. “I’m not even sure the Sierra, its predecessor,has managed to do that yet.”
Lamborghini Diablo SV
Hard to find a greater contrast to a Mondeo than a Lamborghini Diablo SV, launched in the mid-1990s as a higher-powered (but ironically slightly cheaper) version of the standard 1990 Diablo, born as the Countach replacement.
Yet, like the Mondeo, it typifies the 1990s in several ways: it was completed under Chrysler ownership of the company, which came about at a time when big corporations were becoming interested in bespoke sports car manufacturers (Toyota, then General Motors, at Lotus; Ford at Aston Martin).
Its design, originally penned by Marcello Gandini in his sharp-edged style, was ‘softened’ by Chrysler’s people, a move which today indisputably ages the car.
The car you see here was our original road test machine, and it definitely speaks of another era. The scissor-opening doors make ingress and egress very hard, the driving position isn’t brilliant and reversing the Lambo is a guessing game because rear vision is so poor.
Yet when you drive it today there’s a magnificent exuberance about the engine’s thrust and sound – and the all-mechanical gated gearchange – which takes you right away from the curbs and limitations of today. Once you learn its quirks, the car drives very well.
