Ford Grand Tourneo Connect review

When ordering your new Tourneo, you must as before choose between two wheelbases, of 2755mm and 2970mm, and then five or seven seats. Our test car is a long and fully loaded one, and it’s in off-road-you-like Active trim, which sits between Titanium and Sport. You can also have a 112bhp 1.5-litre petrol or 120bhp 2.0-litre diesel engine with a six-speed manual or seven-speed automatic gearbox. Our car has the latter of each.

How obvious are the Volkswagen links? Ford has done a good job of giving the front end a different ‘face’ (far more than some badge engineers have bothered with lately), if the side profile and even the tailgate remain untouched. To be honest, that doesn’t really matter in this market, does it? Nor does the fact that it unashamedly has a VW key with a Ford logo.

What is a problem, though, is the dashboard. I’m getting tired of writing this same stuff over and over again, but no, it’s absolutely not acceptable to have the air conditioning controls operated by touch rather than by feel. Especially not when you adjust the temperature with a stupid slider thing that doesn’t light up at night and therefore becomes invisible.

Trying to adjust the fan speed on a test drive at night made me grateful, for the first time ever, for lane-keeping assistance, keeping this 1.8m-wide van on the right side of the road while I furiously fumbled.

The Volkswagen DNA also means the wider infotainment system is just needlessly complex and difficult to use. I stuck CarPlay on and left it there, because at least Apple knows how to design slick software.

Exploring the cabin, there’s much more to praise. Your first impression is that it feels very airy, thanks to an enormous expanse of a windscreen and tall windows, plus a high roofline. The two front occupants have all the space they could wish for. If they’re not selfish, you could quite easily get five adults into this space, with two children behind – even shorter adults (like my 5ft 9in self) on shorter journeys.

Access is easy, too, thanks to a big sliding door on either side of the car and little toggles that easily pull the middle row out of the way. You can also remove the seats entirely, should you wish, turning a tiny boot into a big one, then in turn an enormous, van-equivalent one. There are myriad oddment storage areas inside, too, including a handy little rubbish bin.

The Tourneo is now based on the Volkswagen Group’s much-used MQB car platform, whereas previously it was derived from the ubiquitous Transit van, and it certainly feels more car-like to drive than I had been expecting.

I’m not going to lie about having driven the previous Tourneo, released in 2014, but I read that that, too, was impressively good in the ride, handling and steering departments, so returning buyers shouldn’t have much to worry about here.

The ride is generally comfortable, even if it is prone to thumping when it encounters a particularly difficult intrusion (hardly a surprise when it’s a big, mostly empty, 1.7-tonne metal box). And you can corner with confidence, because the Tourneo nowhere near as ready to understeer as the uninitiated might think.