... leaves the author with misgivings about the future of autonomous driving

I’ve always struggled with the Ford Kuga. Not the car itself, of course, but the name and I’m sure a large portion of the target demographic struggles with it, too.

For a car aimed squarely at family use, naming your car after a middle-aged predatory woman with a roving eye for younger men (however you spell it) is questionable logic.

But dodgy monikers aside, the new facelifted Kuga makes a pretty compelling case as a practical family skip for hauling people and the detritus of life around.

It’s MPV spacy inside with plenty of headroom and enough legroom in the back for a couple of six footers, especially with the rear seats slid back as far as they’ll go. The space inside actually defies the cars otherwise diminutive external proportions so hats off to the car’s designers at coming up with this Tardis inspired packaging trick.

It’s a crowded market that the Kuga occupies with nearly every major manufacturer competing for sales. Interior space is something the Kuga can proudly laud over its many rivals.

Confession time, though: I spent the majority of our time together hating the car. It wasn’t the performance which is perfectly brisk enough, frugal enough, engaging enough for a car in this class. It wasn’t the ride quality, which strikes a very effective balance between occupant comfort, body control and an impressive isolation from any noise vibration and harshness – excessive tyre noise on rough surfaces aside.

It wasn’t the ergonomics either. Apart from the lack of any lumbar adjustment in the front seats, you can pretty much fine tune your driving position to exactly the plane, height, reach and rake of your liking.

It certainly was nothing to do with the frankly incredible B&O premium audio system.

No, it’s my fault and it all centres around the ‘driver aids’, in particular the steering and the lane departure control. I’ve never encountered such an invasive system. If you even dare stray near a white line (without indicating first) the steering wheel fights you like a recalcitrant gyroscope. It’s a horrible sensation that actually makes you jump and if you’ve ever held a bicycle wheel by the axle and spun it up, you’ll be aware of this feeling.

Now, this technology is fine if you’re nodding off in the middle lane of the M61 at midnight. I get it. It’s there to help. But if you want to make smooth and swift progress along a deserted, twisting A road and occasionally want to use both sides of the road, it’s a real writhing, fighty hindrance.

My point here, and yes, it’s my fault, is that I spent all week trying to turn this system off and failing. My levels of hate were ascending exponentially. The system beat not only me but also my tech-savvy 23 year-old son. Turns out that the desired command to turn lane assist off is hidden on the end of one of the steering column stalks. This information I garnered on day seven of our seventh and final day together.

But the damage was done. It was a graphic, if unfortunate lesson, though. Electronic steering is probably the worst thing to happen to motoring in the past decade. It’s a necessary evil of semi or fully autonomous driving and driver ‘aids’ such as lane departure and lane keeping assist. But even with it switched off (if you knew how to do it) it still blights a car’s feel. The Kuga’s electronic steering, particularly over centre, is synthetically over-geared making the car feel top-heavy and prone to body roll unless you drive it with just two finger tips. It’s also overly keen to self-centre. It’s a tactile travesty.

 I mention autonomous driving for good reason. If the Kuga’s driver aids are anything to go by, we’re a long way off from that particular Utopia. The Kuga I drove had a speed limiter with a mind of its own, sometimes forgetting completely and inexplicably what it had been instructed to do and a lane departure system that only seemed as good as the whiteness or condition of the white lines painted on the road which, let’s face it, are not top priority with our cash strapped county councils right now. And the blind spot assist would frequently see phantom cars even when the road was totally empty as too would the post collision braking warning which needlessly freaked me out on several occasions with its red flashing dash warning.

So the fact that I didn’t find the button to switch all this stuff off until our final day together actually gave me a pretty thorough insight into how useless most of this technology is.

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