Ford’s new Mondeo packs plenty of style and comes specced to the gills. Can it bring some much-needed shine to the Blue Oval brand?

SINGAPORE – The new Ford Mondeo comes with a feature I like to call the Asshole Detector. It’s basically a bright red LED strip that flashes up in front of you if some asshole cuts into your lane, leaving less space between his car and your Mondeo than you’d need to fit a roll of toilet paper.

And if you happen to be the one tailgating someone close enough to set the LED off, then congratulations: you’re the asshole.

Because collisions involving any sort of asshole are something I generally try to avoid, this is a pretty handy feature to have. And it’s just one of the ways in which the Mondeo tries super hard to win you over.

Like its maker, this car is the egghead in primary school that gets good grades but has no friends.

In concrete terms, Ford has practically no presence here. Its market share in Singapore last year, with 208 cars sold, was 0.7 percent. That’s down from 2013’s 0.9 percent, and seems part of a worrying long-term trend for the Blue Oval brand – in the first three months of 2015, Ford’s market share has been a paltry 0.3 percent.

A Mercedes C-class has enough brand equity to keep selling strongly even if next year’s model comes with a cactus for the driver’s seat. It’s basically the equivalent of the hot girl in school who makes you feel grateful for letting you do her homework for her while she’s out with other guys, even though she ignores your texts and thinks you’re useful the same way a bear with diarrhoea thinks the woods are handy.

But the Mondeo? With little brand value to speak of, it’s trying harder by, well, trying harder.

For starters, it aims to get by on a lot of borrowed cool. The styling seems to pinch a bit from Aston Martin (a company that Ford used to own), particularly in the shape of the front grille.

The slim lights and broad stance give it a nice, sporty look with plenty of presence, too, and if our test car’s paintwork had plenty of orange peel finish, the Mondeo at least looked like a posh enough car for a stranger to tell us it he thought it was a Jaguar (another of Ford’s ex-subsidiaries, incidentally).

Visually, things are a little more ordinary at the back, at least for the four-door model. The five-door liftback version, to my eyes anyway, looks a little more distinctive, and should add plenty of practicality.

But there’s more borrowed cool inside, where Ford proudly indicates that Sony supplied the entertainment system. That may or may not impress you – name-dropping is a double-edged sword, after all – but then there’s also a small plate that tells you the car’s “Sync” infotainment system is powered by Microsoft.

Since I don’t know of anyone who thinks (or ever thought) that Bill Gates runs a cool ship, I can only assume that this time the association is there so that Ford can deflect blame; the touchscreen system is slow to react and confusing to use.

But look around and there are other attempts to plunder a bit of cool. You can disable the rear door handles and seal your kids in by pressing a button, for instance, a neat idea borrowed from Volvo (yet another of Ford’s former brands).

Actually, come to think of it, the Mondeo could almost be a Volvo. It’s certainly big enough, and it’s packed with safety equipment. There’s active cruise control (lock on to a target car in front of you and it’ll maintain a safe gap by braking and accelerating automatically), and it won’t just warn you to stay in lane if you start to stray over the road markings, it can gently steer itself to nudge you back into line.

You can get all that in a C-Class, of course, but not at the Ford’s price. Remember, that car doesn’t have to try as hard.

The Ford even drives a bit like a Volvo, with a reassuringly stately way of moving about. Previous Mondeos have been lauded for their handling excellence, but this latest model seems to trade athleticism for refinement.

As you carve through bends, you find yourself wishing for more steering precision and feedback, a bit more stability from the rear of the car, and just a bit more, for want of a better word, fun. In spite of the Aston Martin face, it’s just not as sharp or well-planted as the last Mondeo.

It feels like a heavy car, actually, and though there’s a beefy, 2.0-litre turbo engine under the bonnet with 240bhp, the Mondeo isn’t particularly fast. A BMW 328i has just 5bhp more but feels much, much quicker.

There’s plenty of torque, though. So much, in fact, that sometimes when you put the hammer down you get a big slug of torque-steer – a sudden tug on the wheel – which is another characteristic that discourages spirited driving.

Far better to think of the big Ford as a comfy cruiser, if you ask me. The seats are more softly padded than the German norm, and they’re covered in leather that’s nice and supple (though the upholstery’s cream colour meant that it was starting to look tired after just months on the job in the test car).

There’s plenty of room in the back, and there are seven airbags – two important points for any family man to note, the latter one vitally so.

In fact, the Mondeo offers plenty of car for the money, and I’d bet a princely sum that it would sell much better if there were a Volvo emblem on the grille.

Put another way, it’s a good car hampered by a badge becoming fast forgotten – the hyper practical crowd would feel much safer giving their money to Toyota for a facelifted Camry, while the emotional sort will stretch to a Mercedes C 180 if they can (or a CLA 180 if they can’t). Meanwhile, drive a Ford Mondeo home and your relatives will think you only bought one because you couldn’t afford a Passat. Or a Volvo.

That may be unfair, and I could turn out to be wrong. Maybe the Mondeo’s value-for-money strengths will see it go on to sell by the hundred.

Either way, it’ll be an interesting car to watch because its success or failure will tell us (and Ford) a lot about how, with car prices in Singapore the way they are, brand strength is just as important as product strength here. Useful as it is, I suspect few people are ever going to feel proud about their car’s built-in Asshole Detector.

NEED TO KNOW Ford Mondeo 2.0A GTDI Titanium 4-door
Engine 1,999cc, 16V, turbo in-line 4
Power 240bhp at 5300rpm
Torque 345Nm at 2300 to 4900rpm
Gearbox 6-speed automatic
Top Speed 240km/h
0-100km/h 7.9 seconds
Fuel efficiency 7.5L/100km
CO2 184g/km
Price $174,999 with COE
Availability Now