Everything we thought we knew about the Ford Mondeo has been wrong since Daniel Craig was seen driving one in the Bahamas during Casino Royale. For the occasion of its third reissue, middle England's favourite, unequivocally mainstream saloon had apparently evolved, unpredictably, into a part-time, fireball-evading Bond-mobile.
True, by the time the action reached Montenegro, our hard-bodied hero had ditched the Ford and acquired a more traditional and less rep-friendly Aston Martin DBS V12 - a plot twist that has led Bond aficionados to conclude, even in the absence of shots of 007 queueing at the Hertz desk, that the Mondeo in the earlier sequence must have been a rental. Without a booking. In a very busy period.
Even so, the very fact that a Mondeo could - however briefly and wherever it was sourced - be deemed fit transport for James Bond speaks volumes for the transformation that this car's image has undergone - or, at any rate, for the shattering sum (allegedly £14m) that Ford was prepared to stump up for what was, by any standards, an extremely cute piece of product placement.
Something has changed, though. Later generation Mondeos have been so middle-of-the-road that it was a surprise to find that you could use the steering wheel to hold them on one side or the other of the white line. But the new one wears bodywork with a decidedly classy cut. Close your eyes to the badge on the nose, and who is to say the Audi A4 has greater style or presence?
What's more, the Mondeo drives with refinement, is comfortable to spend time in, shares components with Volvos, comes loaded with more gear than the last lot of models did (an electronic stability programme, controls for the hi-fi, etc, mounted on the steering wheel, a special airbag to protect the driver's knees, among other things) and is marginally cheaper. Everyone ought to have one, and everyone probably will.
Obviously, even in the era of the Ford "Bondeo", the ejector seat remains a special-order item. Ford does, however, innovatively invite us to say farewell to "wrong pump" misery with the Ford EasyFuel system - some cunning resculpting in the area of the fuel cap that makes it impossible to get a diesel nozzle into a petrol model's tank, or a petrol nozzle into a diesel model's tank.
The system is foolproof. Even if you pulled out the pump's pipe to its fullest extent and then ran at the fuel cap carrying the nozzle like a spear, prior to ramming it into the aperture using everything available to you in the way of upper-body strength, it would not admit you.
Big deal, you might say, but never underestimate the challenge involved in choosing the correct fuel pump for your car on the busy, white-knuckle-pressure forecourts of 2007. According to Ford, "accidental mis-fuelling affects more than 150,000 UK drivers every year". Whether Bond is one - and whether, in fact, in Casino Royale he was obliged to take the Mondeo because the Aston Martin was in the garage, being drained of misapplied diesel - is another matter.
