It comes with the Territory

Come snow or heat, over thousands of kms, this Ford made rough rides smooth.

- Brendan Seery

The Cambridge Dictionary defines serendipity as "the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance" and after a few months with us and in the hands of different people, we all agreed that Ford's Territory SUV could well be named Serendipity.

The car has been with us on long-term test for the past few months and nobody who has spent time with it has had a bad word to say. And that is quite surprising, because a long-term test can turn up irritations and difficult-to-live-with features, which are not obvious in the normal, initial seven-day evaluation.

One of the important things to note at the outset was that none of the people who spent time with the Territory aside from me and our multimedia editor Shaun Holland could be considered a petrolhead.

And even the two of us like to take a step back and park our own baggage, in terms of car preferences, to come up with an honest assessment that ordinary people will find valuable. By ordinary people, we mean non-motoring journos, sadly.

The Territory has had a bit of a rough ride from some of them, although mainly in private. Snigger, snigger. Chinese car. Not a real Ford. Let's call it the Chery-tory... ha ha ha.

Having spent time with the Territory, us journos who write about cars as opposed to "motoring journalists" are wondering whether to be called a Chinese brand is an insult or a compliment these days.

And ordinary South Africans don't seem to have that anti-Sino bias: The Territory is, as far as I can see from the sales figures, the second best-selling medium SUV in South Africa at the moment, selling well over 300 units a month, and only slightly behind the Omoda C5.