The Puma’s powertrain has a downsized, turbo three-pot capable of shutting off entirely when the car’s coasting; of deactivating a cylinder when running lean; and of using on a 15bhp, 37lb ft electric motor to boost overall efficiency, outright performance or drivability. It works really well 99% of the time to conceal the technical complexity needed to achieve all that.
It hauls the car along from lowish revs with impressive responsiveness and a pleasingly accessible sense of oomph. Perhaps more importantly, it only allows you to become aware of the complexity of its operating brief in the most fleeting moments – sometimes with a hint of inconsistency in its braking response if you happen to knock the car out of gear early when decelerating, or with a slightly abrupt take-up of drive just as you tip into the accelerator pedal. These are problems you’d be likely to become conscious of only if you were anticipating them, though.
Considering how much it plainly does to boost low-rev torque, saving you from otherwise necessary gearchanges, the mild-hybrid system adds much more to the car’s overall drivability than it detracts.
On a wet test day, the Puma took a two-way average of 10.0sec to hit 60mph from rest, a fairly strong if not exceptional showing. But the fact that it was almost 7.0sec (or about 40%) quicker accelerating from 30mph to 70mph in fourth gear than the 1.0-litre turbocharged Juke we tested previously illustrates the difference made by Ford’s hybrid system.
When pulling from low engine speeds in higher gears, you can feel the torque it contributes quite clearly – and, if you watch the tacho needle, you can also feel the point in the rev range (just above 4000rpm) when the electric motor has to switch off.
The car has a healthy-feeling outright performance level for mixed road driving and a short, pleasant, well-defined gearshift action. It’s smooth enough and as powerful and stable as it needs to be, under braking, although it’s easier to judge your initial pedal inputs once you’ve learned to squeeze the middle pedal only after you’ve already selected a lower gear.
It’s best not to downshift in the middle of a deceleration phase where you can avoid it, since doing so interferes slightly with the regenerative braking you get from the hybrid system and spoils the initial braking response a little.
The automatic gearbox fails to live up to the engine. In normal mode, it’s much too eager to change up and too reluctant to kick down, which blunts performance when you most need it. Sport mode has the opposite problem; too eager to go down through the gears rather than let the engine rev through the mid-range. The ‘manual’ mode helps with the timing of gearchanges, but doesn’t like to hold onto your chosen ratio under full power.
Ford Puma assisted driving notes
The entry-level Titanium Puma has autonomous emergency braking, conventional cruise control and lane-keeping assist. An optional Driver Assistance pack brings blindspot warning, cross-traffic alert and traffic jam assist systems, among others, and adds ‘intelligent’ distance-keeping functionality to the cruise control.
The systems are generally tuned so as to be quite discreet but can, in most cases, be adjusted for sensitivity and, in some cases, deactivated completely. Even in its most sensitive setting, the lane-keeping aid keeps the driver engaged. However, it didn’t always detect the bounds of a motorway lane through roadworks or in bad weather.
It is able to consistently recognise posted speed limits and offered a speeding warning but couldn’t adapt the car’s set cruise control speed automatically. Still, for a £25k car, the Puma’s assisted driving functionality is fairly extensive and impressive.