2.0TDCi Titanium

Good Car but too many problems....

I bought my 1year old 2.0 TDCi Titanium from Ford Direct with 5000 miles on the clock. Bought in Blue with the appearance pack it looked great. The interior is a nice design, and a nice place to spend time on long journeys and the car handles really well - as you’d expect from modern Fords. I’ve read lots of positive reviews about the Grand C-Max and its build quality/reliability, so maybe the robots were having a bad day or had been to the pub when they built ours!

After four months the seat release mechanism broke the night before we went on holiday meaning we couldn’t use the seats as we wished to for the two weeks.

The clutch for the Air-con needed replacing – under warranty – due to the noise it was making when the A/C was not running.

It developed a Child-lock Malfunction which was fixed with a software update – only to re-appear a week later! An Immobiliser failure also occurred where the car refused to start for 10minutes then suddenly decided it would start- no error codes showed up on the system so this couldn’t be diagnosed or fixed – luckily it didn’t happen again (but we did only own the car for two more weeks) due to the following problem:

We’d been struggling to engage reverse gear from an early stage in our ownership, and got progressively worse, where 1st or 2nd would need to be selected prior to getting reverse. It had trips back to the dealer, where they adjusted what they could but made little or no difference. Eventually the Clutch Master cylinder was replaced under warranty but didn’t fix the problem.

It was suggested that either the flywheel or the clutch itself was failing – at 30000miles!! The garage said it didn’t think it was the flywheel due to no tell-tale signs or noises, so was thinking it was more likely to be the clutch which wasn’t covered by warranty. I contacted Ford Customer relations to try and get something out of them as I was not going to pay for a new clutch in a 2.5 year old car with 30K on the clock. I’ve never had to replace a clutch yet, so I’m convinced it’s got nothing to do with my driving.
Sadly Ford were not willing to compromise at all and wanted me to pay for the diagnosis of the fault which was going to be £300 as it meant taking the gearbox off!
So the car was promptly traded in for a different make and Ford have lost a loyal customer in me due to their total lack of co-operation. As I said at the start of this essay, I really liked the car, it’s just a shame the ownership experience was tainted so badly.

On top of all that it needed two front tyres at 15000 miles - I know there are lots of variables when it comes to tyres but 15K for manufacturer specified tyres seems a bit low to me. Four more were needed at 25000 miles (the ones I had fitted at 15K were of a softer compound - my mistake).

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