Comment on a Future Classic Car

The new Thunderbird is a marketing failure. We know this to be true because Ford only sold a few thousand of them last year, the rest of them still languishing in dealership lots. It's a good car - based on the excellent Jaguar S, Lincoln LS platform - with adequate power and lots of comfort and safety equipment. Its soft top is a marvel of fit-and-finish and the porthole-fitted hard top works flawlessly. So why did it not sell?

A number of automotive writers have concluded that a combination of price, performance and demographics is the cause of the car's failure. I disagree. The price, starting at $35,000 and topping out in the low $40's, isn't all that different from a bunch of other two-seat cars on the market and the T-Bird offers more amenities than most of them.

On the performance front the T-Bird isn't a slug. It goes (quietly, but forcefully), stops and handles just fine, certainly well enough to suit most buyers of such cars. First-year cars seemed a bit sluggish but Ford added some horsepower and now the car is quite peppy. It's heavy, but so what? People don't care about that as long as the car is fun to drive.

Demographics dictate that 35-55 year-old buyers should have flocked to the car, equally divided between the sexes. They didn't. The T-Bird failed to attract them in any significant numbers. When polled about the styling they called the car "cute."

That's why I say the failure of the T-Bird is due to the styling. In general, Jay Mays and the rest of the styling group did a nice job of resurrecting ("reinterpreting," was the word they used) the form of the original, classic '55-56-57 T-Birds. The grille is a good copy, the hood has enough of a throwback to the air scoop and the beltline along the side is very reminiscent of the originals.

Where it fails is at the rear. The deck slopes down to nothingness, punctuated with big, over-the-top tail lenses. It vaguely looks like the original but comes off as something that was stuck on at the last minute. What it lacks is fins, or even vestiges of fins, and that's where the old T-Birds drew so much of their character.

I happen to know that Ford went to great lengths to keep the new T-Bird aerodynamic and quiet, even with the top down. That's one reason for the lack of fins or hints of them. Unfortunately, they should have ignored that dictum and put little fins on anyway. I say the public would have called the car "beautiful," "gorgeous," or "provocative," rather than "cute."

Those three former words cause cars to sell. "Cute" doesn't. Just ask VW.