13 Dec 07
One of the many pluses to the S-Max has been its reliability. Tom did manage to break the centre armrest/storage area early on in its life, but apart from that it has withstood the rigours of living with two-year-old Evie and seven-year-old Daisy - which is no mean achievement.
The mechanicals have also performed sterling work, coping with long, high-speed motorway journeys and numerous short inner-city trips with equal ease. The latter can be particularly testing: my wife would at least once a week drive from home to Daisy's school half a mile away, stop, pick her up, drive her to ballet class/tennis lesson/party (rarely further than a mile), drop her off and go home again, only to have to return to pick her up an hour or so later. The engine would never have a chance to warm up properly and there's the stop-start nature of inner London traffic, involving a great deal of braking and changing of gears.
Not once did the S-Max complain. Not once did it not start first time. And not once did it break down. The S-Max is too new to have been included in the most recent JD Power survey, but I'll be interested to see how it does when the next one is published in the spring.
The array of gadgets in our highly specced car also performed well: the DVD player managed to cope with a steady flow of Harry Potter movies, The Sound of Music, Oliver!, School of Rock and the numerous other movies Daisy watched on long journeys; the six-CD changer under the driver's seat always held a full cassette of sounds from my library; the centre console had an additional slot for CDs that also played MP3 discs; the sat nav was always accurate and gave us the option of three routes to any destination; and the voice control function always understood my Welsh-accented commands, in addition to being a constant source of amusement to Daisy ('Daddy, the car's talking to you again!').
The Bluetooth phone system was also invaluable, allowing me to legally continue to make calls on the move: it did fall over once, in the middle of an important work conversation, but apart from that it was incredibly useful. Frankly, with the law the way it is now, I believe that every new car should come fitted a Bluetooth system. A simple system isn't expensive and every carmaker should be encouraging responsible phone use in their vehicles by fitting one - and not profiteering by adding a ridiculous amount to the price of the car.
