SA Roadtests
South Africa
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This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.
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*Please remember too, that prices quoted were those ruling on the days I wrote the reports.
Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday September 5, 2012
Oddly-spelled Kuga is Ford’s debut into the world of crossovers and like many another latecomer, the company waited to get it pretty close to right, before releasing. Although it’s also offered with two versions of the 2.0-litre Duratorq diesel overseas, Ford SA chose to stick with just the trusty 2.5-litre, five-cylinder turbopetrol motor for its introduction here.
Detuned slightly from Volvo and previous generation Focus ST specification, the Kuga version puts out 147 kW of power at 6000 rpm rather than the others’ 169 or 166 kW. Torque remains the same at 320 Nm between 1600 and 4000 rpm. The gearbox used in both trim levels on offer, is the five-speed 5-Tronic automatic driving through a Thorsen on-demand awd system. Our press unit was the lower-specification Trend variant.
Otherwise the same as upper crust Titanium, Trend does without a panoramic sunroof, a few trim items, a heated front screen, height adjustment for the front passenger’s chair, reverse parking radar, an auto-dimming interior mirror, automatic headlamps and wipers and tinted windows. It also makes do with single channel air conditioning in place of automatic climate control and 17” alloy wheels rather than 18-inchers. Choosing the basic package could save you R21 270, but because so many of these things are expected at this price level you will probably bite the bullet and pay up.
Safety items include six airbags, ABS with EBD and EBA, traction control, anti-rollover mitigation, keyless entry and starting and ISOFix anchorages. Standard equipment features single touch powered windows, electrically operated and heated outside mirrors with indicator repeaters and courtesy lights, front and rear fog lamps, roof rails and a split tail gate. Entertainment is taken care of with an eight-speaker RDS radio and CD player with USB and auxiliary connectors and Bluetooth with voice control. Comfort items include cruise control, leather upholstery with seat warmers and “follow me” headlights.
We asked a friend about her Kuga. “Bloody marvellous, Doll” was the response, followed by an enthusiastic dissertation on performance, comfort, space and reasonable fuel economy for a vehicle of its size and power. It gets a bit thirsty around town, she agreed, but “Jo’burg and back, 9-comma-5.”
It certainly has all the power one needs in a family SUV, it was as comfortable as that expensive British vehicle over washboarded and potholed dirt roads, the gearbox works well and internal space is more than adequate. Our favourite rocky forest trail didn’t faze it either. Creeping gently in automatic mode and letting each wheel find traction as needed, was the way to go. If you plan on doing this sort of thing often, we would choose this car’s 225/55 R17 rubber rather than the Titanium’s 45-profile tyres though.
Ground clearance is only 188 mm and approach and departure angles are just 21 and 25 degrees respectively, so serious boonie bashing should be left to specialists. Ford hadn’t got back to us about break-over angle by the time we finished writing this, but its intended buyers probably wouldn’t care much anyway.
Kuga, Ford’s newest commuting and recreational vehicle combines jungle cat performance with kitten-like comfort. It’s a grand buy, even though its name is spelled funny.
The numbers
Price: R385 580
Engine: 2521 cc, five-cylinder, DOHC 20-valve, turbo petrol
Power and torque: See text
Zero to 100 km/h: 8,8 seconds
Maximum speed: 205 km/h
Real life fuel economy: About 11,8 l/100 km
Tank: 66 litres
Luggage space: 360 to 1355 litres
Warranty: 4 years/120 000 km with 3 years’ roadside assistance
Service plan: 4 years/80 000 km at 20 000 km intervals
This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.
What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.
Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.
My articles appear every Wednesday in the motoring pages of The Witness, South Africa's oldest continuously running newspaper, and occasionally on Saturdays in Weekend Witness as well. I drive eight to ten vehicles most months of the year (press cars are withdrawn over the festive season - wonder why?) so not everything gets published in the paper. Those that are, get a tagline but the rest is virgin, unpublished and unedited by the political-correctness police. Hope you like what you see, because there are no commercial interests at work here. As quite a few readers have found, I answer every serious enquiry from my home email address, with my phone numbers attached, so they can see I do actually exist.
I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax.
So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!
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SA Roadtests
South Africa
ctjag8