Imagine, for a moment, you are a plant. Well, not just any plant. You are Robert Plant, and everywhere you go, people want you to sing “Stairway to Heaven”. I’d rather not, you tell them. Never liked that one much, to be honest. We’ve a much better song that I’d much rather sing. Called ‘Kashmir’, dontcha know. Much better, that one. For years, you refuse to perform the song. You cancel a proposed Led Zeppelin reunion because the promotion company insists, positively insists, that you play “Stairway”. You’d rather play “Kashmir”. And since you don’t really need the money, that’s the end of it.

I suspect the people who run Ford can sympathize a bit with Mr. Plant. Their “Stairway” is a four-door SUV called the Explorer. You might have heard of it. Sold a bunch, that Explorer, even though it was always kind of a hokey tune, a Ranger truck with a cap and a couple rows of plastic-leather seats, perched sky-high on underinflated Firestones.

The Explorer was never a truly outstanding answer to the family-wagon question, so a couple years back Ford created the Flex, which is an outstanding answer. It should have made the Explorer obsolete, but there were two problems. It wasn’t really an SUV, and it wasn’t an Explorer. And since Ford, unlike Zeppelin’s Golden God, needs the money…

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O Brave New World, that has such automobiles in it! Welcome to the twenty-seven-thousand-dollar, mainstream-brand, non-specialty-model compact car. Open the door. All but the most perversely sybaritic will find their list of requirements fulfilled. A direct-injection engine teams with a twin-clutch transmission to deliver up to forty miles per gallon. We grip a steering wheel with brash aluminum trim and a half-dozen complex controls. The instrument panel has an LCD screen which surpasses the optional hardware in cars like the Audi A5, while the center stack has better resolution than your netbook. Everything you can see or touch feels ready to challenge your neighbor’s G35 or 328i for perceived quality.

The Ford Focus Titanium is, theoretically, the direct descendant of the 1981 Ford Escort “world car”, but on the road it feels much more closely related to the old Nissan Primera, known to us as the Infiniti G20. (Read More…)

A top speed of over 140mph. Zero to sixty in less than 7 seconds. A composed suspension and jellybean-sleek sheet metal that still looks handsome after all these decades. That’s the 1989 Ford Taurus SHO, but Sergio Perfetti’s example is more than the sum of its historically relevant parts. And not just because it’s won two consecutive endurance races in the 24 Hours of LeMons on a $500 budget.

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With Dodge decidedly losing the torque-war in the heavy duty pickup truck segment, it’s up to Ford and GM to battle out the pickup truck war of the decade. In this corner we have the 2011 Ford F-250 Super Duty Diesel sporting the lightly retuned 6.7L turbo engine that is currently king of the pickup truck hill at 800ft-lbs. For 2011, Ford decided to drop the problematic 6.4L Navistar diesel engine in favor of an all-new, all-Ford 6.7L twin turbo V8 cranking out 400HP and an incredible 800lb-ft of torque. Connected to the ground via Ford’s 6R140 heavy-duty TorqShift six-speed automatic transmission, the amazing feat of engineering is not that the engine can make this much twist, but that the transmission can take it.

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While my invitation to the media burnout fest musta been lost in the mail, I attended a regional ride/drive event to cover the four new engines in the 2011 Ford F-150 as compared to some of its domestic competition. The afternoon included a fairly-lame autocross, a (short) drag strip and real world tests, unladen and towing. The product specialist made a point to ask everyone to tell their friends about this event. Luckily for Ford, I got a lot of people to tell.

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We’ve seen the sequence too many times before. Enthusiasts beg GM and Ford to offer their international products in the U.S. They offer one. It fails to sell. It gets canceled. Nevertheless, Ford plans to replace its entire small-to-midsize lineup with vehicles developed in and primarily for Europe. So this time it had better work out. First up: the subcompact Fiesta. (Read More…)

After driving the Chevrolet Camaro SS for a couple of days, and enjoying the experience much less than I expected to, I began to question my expectations. Perhaps having the Lexus IS-F for a week had unfairly put the Chevrolet in a bad light? After all, the IS-F was twice the price and a Lexus, so of course the Detroit Oshawa, Ontario iron seemed coarse in comparison. The obvious test: a 2011 Mustang GT 5.0.

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Okay, everybody, take out your old Waitresses or Bouncing Souls songbooks, and sing along with me:

I know what girls like
I know what chicks want
I know what girls like
Girls like
…the Ford Edge.

Ford’s rolled 400,000 Edges out the door since the model was introduced five years ago. For reasons I cannot understand, it completely obliterated the Flex and the Freestyle/Taurus X at dealerships, outselling them combined by a factor of two or three in most months. Half of the Edges sold are registered to women, which likely means that far more than half of them were selected by, and are driven by, women. According to Ford, among buyers in this segment, “styling” ranks as the #5 reason to buy a vehicle, but Edge buyers rank “styling” as the number one reason they chose one.

So here’s the new one. Ford has made a solid effort to address the Edge’s shortcomings. It has more power, less weight (in some models), better brakes, and a much higher-quality interior. The dynamic package is significantly improved, and I had the chance to test that in a literally life-threatening situation, as we’ll see below. None of this will matter too much to the Coach-bag set, however. They’ll be blown-away by the new “myFord Touch” system… and if you care at all about the state of in-car electronics, you will be, too.
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Reviving a legendary nameplate inevitably invites comparisons. As is often the case, those for the new 2010 Ford Taurus SHO have not been favorable. Judging from reviews, forum postings, and (I’ll predict) the comments below, the 2010 lacks whatever made the original legendary. Well, I drove the original SHO back in 1989. And now I’ve driven the 2010 for a week. For better or worse, the similarities outweigh the differences. So, what’s missing in the SHO’s revival?

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