Game of thrones
Goodbye Ford Tourneo Custom £40,480 OTR/£40,480 as tested
Time to say goodbye to the Tourneo Custom. It’s been one hell of a useful ride... We opted to try out the new Tourneo (basically a Transit with seats) to see if a family of five can face living with a vehicle of this size, compared with a seven-seat SUV.
As well as family-car duties, the Tourneo has been a useful support car – its highlight being PCOTY last year (see issue 314). But while it’s second to none for having ample space, for passengers and luggage, for being easy to drive, being practical, looking good and being reliable, there was one area it wasn’t quite as good as I hoped it’d be... the seats.
The Tourneo has a mind-numbing number of configurations (see panel), but physically changing the seats around is a real faff. First of all, there is a vast number of handles to deal with, some that repeat themselves and some that are just plain frustrating. Don’t get me wrong – the engineering that’s gone into making these seats is incredible. But they are confusing to move around, and any good design should be obvious to use without needing to resort to an instruction manual.
My first attempt at seat configuration was to change the middle row of seats to face forward as opposed to backwards. Simple, you think? Job one: fold the seats. So, there’s a strap that you pull in the crease of the seat to make it fold in half, but wait... the handle on the side of the seat does the same job. Cue lots of head scratching trying to work out which one of the handles makes the seat tip forward. More bewilderingly, there’s yet another handle further down that folds the seat in half and then tips it onto its end. Still with me? (This is not the same for the rear seats – they have straps to release the seats onto their ends).
But there’s more... the really complicated bit is getting the seats out and swapping them around. In order to fully remove them there are a further three handles that need pulling. Two straps (pulled simultaneously) which release them and then another larger and more central handle needs to be pulled up to release the seats off the rails in the floor.
A word of warning: be careful of the mechanism in the back of the seat – there’s lots of potential to get your fingers caught. Also be very careful when moving them, they are extremely heavy and I found it was back-breaking stuff. In fact, moving these seats is a two-man job, which in the real world isn’t always feasible.
Anyway, back to swapping the middle seats to facing forwards... because the fun doesn’t end there. You’d think that they’d merely spin around and clip back in on the same side. But no, and even more time was wasted trying to figure out why they wouldn’t clip in. Believe me, when trying to fiddle with something that’s so heavy, it was extremely challenging. It doesn’t help that the label that was on the fold of the seat was about as easy to decipher as the instructions on Swedish flatpack furniture. And to turn the seats around, you also have to swap them to their opposite side!
Once figured out, the combination options are varied and very useful, but surely it doesn’t need to be so complicated?
I’ll miss this car, though – it’s been reassuringly good at the basics, like having a manual handbrake and a sweet manual gear change. Don’t believe me? Ask Chris Harris. And yes I’ve had to adjust the way I drive compared with a normal road car, but it’s worth it for the ultimate family tool. Is it better than a conventional SUV? Absolutely, but if you want more luxury you’ll have to open your wallet a lot wider.