IF you Mondeo is reliable, then don't bother changing. Mainly because you could well be buying an unreliable car, especially at the price band you're looking at.

I'd suggest putting some money to a set of winter wheels and tyres, and changing over to them at the end of October.

If you go here :

www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/parts-and-accessories/20.../

You'll find HJ's guide to tyres, etc. Also a decent list of suppliers.

As to how it'll handle on ice/snow, with winter tyres on ? Slightly better than with summers on. Too many people seem to think that with winters on a car will defy physics. You'll see lots of them parked in hedgerows !

Winter tyres are better, but only in the very cold, on warmer wet winter days they might not grip as well as decent quality summer tyres.

Obviously in snow they are far superior and on ice they offer more than the almost no grip of summers.

As with summer tyres, quality varies a lot, a good summer tyre like a Uniroyal Rain Expert i would prefer in the winter to a cheap winter of unpronounceable and dubious origin.

To be honest unless you live in the wilds, you'd be just as well to change to proper all season tyres instead of pure winter tyres if you think you might have need of snow and ice grip...which you obviously do to have started the thread.

Note, proper all seaon tyres are stamped with the snowflake and mountain symbol which usually means they have at least part of the tread made with the correct compound of high silica content for sold weather grip, lots of good makes out there offer them, Goodyear, Vredestein, Uniroyal just three of many quality brands.

All seasons without the mountain and snowflake symbol are not winter rated.

If you wanted a better than normal summer tyre, designed for the wet but happens to work pretty blinkin good in all but the worse winter, you could do far worse than have a poke nose at the Uniroyal Rain Experts i mentioned above, happen to be very good value too.

Tyreleader is about as cheap a source of any tyres you might need as anywhere, very easy website.