Ford Mondeo

Best-seller was a game-changer for Blue Oval

- Matt Robinson

IT was around this time last year that the last-ever fourth-generation Ford Mondeo rolled off the production line in Valencia, Spain. And while Ford has made a successor of sorts, the fifth-generation car that bears the name is a different sort of proposition, and one reserved only for the Chinese market.

The Mondeo then, as far as anyone in the west should be concerned, is dead. Wind back the clock to the mid-nineties, and such a prospect would have seemed inconceivable. This was a car Ford sold nearly 130,000 of in the UK alone in its first year of production, rocketing it to the top of the country's best-sellers list. It was the car that spearheaded a turnaround for a manufacturer that had long been stagnating, while proving that regular car buyers didn't need to settle for something run of the mill

It even inspired one of the great political catchphrases of the decade: Mondeo man. This was used as a catch-all for the kind of home-owning, self-made types the Labour Party needed to win back to oust the Conservatives in the 1997 General Election. Ironically, though, in the speech that gave birth to the term, it was the Sierra that Labour leader Tony Blair mentioned, not the Mondeo.

This leads us neatly to the Mondeo's immediate predecessor, which by the early nineties was feeling rather long in the tooth. The Sierra's drastic mid-life visual overhaul might have meant it looked very different to the initial version, but there was no hiding just how old the model had become. It was one of a few cars that were dragging Ford down. For the sake of the marque's image and its finances, it wasn't enough for the Mondeo to be better than the Sierra; it had to blow that ageing car out of the water. And thankfully for the Blue Oval, it did.