Category: Small 4x4s 
Price Range: £20,900 to £22,900
Great to drive, practical interior, class-leading emissions, fine residuals.
Bland looks, rear headroom tight with panoramic roof.
Kuga may not be the most visually appealing 4x4, but under the skin it's one of the best.
Ford has made remarkable progress in improving the quality across all of its models. Witness the company's completely revised 2008 Focus that improved over the previous model's patchy materials. The Focus-based Kuga, unsurprisingly, dips heavily into the Focus parts bin, which is no bad thing because it raises the feeling of quality yet further. It had to deliver a quality cabin since this latest Ford-badged 4x4 starts at over twenty grand and buyers should expect nothing less.
There are a few lapses, though. The centre cupholders have cheap-feeling rubber strips to hold bottles in place, while the glovebox closes with an unsatisfying (and cheap) thunk. Other than that it feels like some thought had been employed to make the interior feel much more than a Focus on jacks.
Quality gains aside, the important question for many is how the Kuga will fare in terms of reliability. It uses a lot of the mechanicals on the Focus, which has proved pretty hardy so far, so it's fair to assume that it should be reliable.
You have to look at the bigger picture, and in terms of reliability, its Japanese rivals are still holding all the cards. Ford is still performing below average in owner satisfaction surveys and the pre-facelift Focus only features mid-table in reliability surveys. Hopefully the revisions on the new Ford Focus will filter through and give Kuga customers greater peace of mind.
