The death of Mondeo Man

It recently came to my attention that Ford have quietly launched a brand new Mondeo for 2015. This must have been a low-key event as the new model completely passed me and several other car enthusiasts by and I have seen little advertising, but not so long ago the debut of a new Mondeo would have been a cause of major excitement among company car drivers and fleet managers eager to get their hands on something new to show off to their colleagues. That just shows how marginal this once-universal model has become - the ubiquity of Mondeos was such that they even entered popular culture by spawning a nickname for the type of people who typically drove them, sales reps in the 1990s being almost universally characterised as 'Mondeo Man'. Nowadays though, it seems Mondeo Man is becoming an endangered species and has been usurped by 'German Saloon Man' as the traditional Mondeo users are turning en masse to 'prestige' brands such as Audi, BMW and Mercedes.