Titanium 1.6 TDCi 5dr People Carrier

A mid-sized seven seater that's great fun to drive.

I bought this as a replacement for an 06 1.8TDCi C-Max, and the build quality of this car is way better. It feels like a much more expensive vehicle, and the interior design is nicer than its rivals.

When new the car was very sluggish, difficult to pull away at lights and labouring up hills. Now I've put nearly 10,000 miles on it's now run in and loosened up and is much more responsive. I would say that for a car this weight the 1.6TDCi is a little underpowered, and I would have gone for the 2.0 TDCi if I'd known that.

Fuel economy is not as good as Ford claims, but isn't too bad. I average around 45mpg on my 35 mile mixed road and motorway commute, and have achieved 57mpg on a 200 mile motorway trip. My old C-Max would average around 64mpg on the same trip, but the Grand C-Max does weigh a bit more.

The car is great to drive and doesn't feel like an MPV at all. The 1.6 TDCi engine is a bit slow off the mark, but cruises wonderfully on motorways. The road handling is superb, with virtually no body roll.

The driving position, like all C-Max cars is excellent, and the dash-board is well designed, clear and easy to read. It has a standard analogue speedo and rev counter, which I find much easier to read than the digital equivalents in other cars. It has more gadgets than my old car, an the Sony sound system is excellent. I didn't buy the extra optional gadgets like auto-parking or electric tail-gate, so I can't comment on those. I did get a space-saver wheel though, which has already proved useful when I had a tyre blow out.

The seating arrangement is very spacious and practical. In my normal driving seat position the middle row seats have plenty of leg-room. The middle seats can recline, which is very popular with my car sharing colleagues. It's the first car where I've found people fight to be in the back rather than the front passenger seat! There's plenty of head-room in the back, great for tall teenagers like my son.

The middle seat is narrow, but there is enough room for three adults in the back, though there's not a lot of elbow room. You could easily fit two baby or car seats, but there's not much room for a third.

The sliding doors are very practical. They make getting in and out of the car in tight parking places easy, and I don't have to worry about my children denting other car doors. The doors are heavy, but very free moving, so you have to be careful when opening and closing on a slope.

The rear two folding seats are surprisingly comfortable, even for adults, but there is not a lot of leg-room. I have had 6 adults in the car and it may be a bit of a squeeze you still get more room than you'd have in the back of a small car like a Fiesta. The middle seats slide fowards and backwards, so you can adjust them to give more leg-room to the rear seats at the expense of the middle.

The boot is large, but fairly shallow with the cover on. The rear seats aren't removable (at least not without tools) which is a shame as it would be good to have that option to get more boot space.

My biggest gripe about the boot is there's nowhere to store the tonneau cover when you have the rear seats up. You have to take it out of the car, which isn't ideal if you later fold down the seats and need to put items in the boot.

I've found the tyres are very expensive as on my model they're 215/55's instead of the 205/55's found on the standard C-Max.

Overall I really like the car. It's fun to drive, practical, and the extra seats have come in very useful on several occasions even though we don't use them regularly.

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