Titanium 2.2 TDCi 5dr People Carrier

Fantastic all round family car

I felt at nearly five years and 68k miles old I would take the opportunity to reflect on the pros and cons of S-Max ownership.

This is the first new car I have purchased, as my wife was coming out of a company car scheme we had nothing to trade in and I took advantage of great discounts on Drive the Deal to obtain this top spec S-Max for little over £20k.

We have gone from one to three children over the ownership of the car and it has met almost all of our expectations of it. Positives are the spacious, generally well built interior, which is comfortably for three tall adults in the middle, even behind my 6'2" frame. Three car seats are easily manageable side by side, kids can climb in and out easily and are easy to strap in. Electric memory seats/mirrors are genuinely useful when two of you of completely different sizes regularly drive the car. The Bi-Xenon headlights are genuinely excellent compared with standard lights and with other cars equipped with Xenons I have driven. Particularly on unlit country roads they provide excellent vision due to the high beam being Xenon also. It goes and handles exceptionally well for such a large vehicle, so as a keen driver I do not feel like I am driving a bus, as I did in many other such vehicles I tried. Moving from my own 2.0-litre Hyundai with 320Nm torque to this with 400Nm there is a huge difference in shove (and refinement), despite the extra weight.

It handled exceptionally on its factory 18-inch wheels but if you use the performance will eat the tyres as you would expect in such a heavy front wheel drive vehicle. The best I got out of a set of Michelins (as are factory fit) was 16k on the front, although neither myself or my wife hang around. At 200+ per tyre these are one the most expensive running costs. For the last three winters we have run it on 16-inch steel wheels with Nokian winter tyres. These make a huge difference in the cold/wet/snow and the tyre life (with rotation) has been over 30k miles, a huge difference. As we now live at the end of a 0.5mi rough track, the steel wheels are fitted permanently for the extra cushioning of the 60 profile tyres, with all season tyres, and do not affect the handling too badly in less you want to drive it like a GTI (and yes, with this you can).

Fuel economy has been between 35-40 mpg consistently, while the best ever on a long run was 42mpg. My normal cruising speed on the motorway is 70mph. Towing our 1300kg caravan it does 26-30mpg. It is an excellent, very stable towing vehicle due to its long wheelbase and fantastic torque. However, the clutch/flywheel combo makes it very poor for reversing when towing (I know of several on the S-Max forum who have burnt out their clutch reversing their van) so I always unhitch and use my caravan motor mover for this.

Reliability has generally been good. We had an issue over last winter with it going into limp home mode on a few occasions, under hard acceleration, usually not that long after a fill of fuel. The first time this happened we took it to a dealer who replaced the fuel filter, a common problem apparently with supermarket diesel/waxing of filter in winter. However, the problem recurred after this replacement, but could always be reset by stopping and restarting the car. This never happens in summer so I'm convinced it's to do with fuel lubricity/anti waxing additives. It has been run on a diet of cheap supermarket diesel but I think I will start using more expensive stuff next winter to see if this helps with this problem!

Servicing was reasonable under warranty at Ford dealerships and is cheap as chips at my local indie. It never uses a drop of oil between services, service intervals are sensible at 12.5k and as it is so cheap I now get the oil/filter changed every 10k. Very unlike my VW group diesels which had an appetite for expensive fully synthetic oil designed for long life servicing (well done Ford for not going down this route, even if it does annoy the fleet users).

Another user on this site said he got through three sets of front brake discs and pads on his in 24k miles! My wife drives heavy on the brakes and is the main user of the vehicle. We have had the rear pads replaced once and the front pads once in 68k miles, including several thousand towing our van. The front pads were only done at 60k miles. The brake set up is such that it seems to wear the rear pads more quickly than the fronts, strange on a front wheel drive car but my father in law says his people carrier has a similar wear pattern so I don't worry about it.
The other main maintenance expense has been a set of rear suspension bushes. These started to fail at 55k miles, but this was due I suspect to our 0.5mile unmade track to our home, rather than the part itself. Ford only supply the bushes with the rear wishbones, but my local indie managed to source some and fit for £140, which considering it is a three hour job, I did not think bad at all.

It does have some small but significant (for us) design flaws. The rear doors are massive, great for access but getting in an out in tight spaces is difficult. I wish it had sliding rear doors. For a family car there are some simple practical drawbacks. There are no 12v power outlets for the middle row so we stretch cables back from the front for DVD players etc for the kids. I don't know why they missed this out, as my dad's (older) C-Max includes a middle row 12v socket. Slide up sun blinds should be standard for the rear seats, not an optional extra, and I wish I had ordered them for the kids. The top parts of the dash are good quality, but lower down the penny pinching shows (whatever HJ says, the interior is not yet up to Audi quality), and our glove box spring/latching failed at just over two years old. I took it to the dealer, expecting it to be covered by the three year warranty to be told this was "trim" and only guaranteed for two years. The replacement parts at over £60 could not be justified so we still have a dodgy glovebox at five years old!
Stuff rolls out of the boot when you open it with great ease. I have lost two pots of paint and a few bottles of wine this way, even though I invested in a made to measure boot liner. Ford supply a thin plastic rod (like a curtain pole) that fits in holes either side to create a lip, but that just gets in the way and breaks way too easily when you start putting pushchairs etc. in to the boot. The auto dimming rear view mirror doesn't also dim the wing mirrors, as was the case in our Skoda that came before this. I wouldn't have missed it if I hadn't have known it existed but that was a great feature when driving on busy multilane roads at night.

Although there are niggles, they are minor and for the way it drives and the flexibility it has offered our growing family I cannot think of a better car for the job. I have looked at replacing it recently but after research concluded at present there isn't anything else that offers the same combination of space/flexibility and driving characteristics on the market. I concluded I would only buy another S-Max, and as the 2.2 has been discontinued and the 2.0 has slightly less power and less torque by some margin, I will stick with ours and run it for a couple more years, anticipating a clutch and flywheel replacement in that time.

Report as offensive