Saturday, June 13, 2009

Ford Motor Coolness - Who'd of Thunk It?

As someone that has happily owned a Toyota, Nissan, Toyota, Subaru and then Toyota in the 20-year car owning portion of my life, I'm now fairly amazed to be interested in what Ford Motor is doing. Press about it appearing to be the only solvent major US car company combined with two recent articles about new models make me think that maybe one day I'll actually own a Ford.

In it's July issue, Esquire Magazine named it's 2009 Car of the Year... the Ford Taurus SHO. Never would have expected what I consider to be a pretty hip and forward type magazine to talk up a Ford like this, much less a Taurus, but the car is described (as part of an interesting and short read) in pretty glowing terms. Also, as the picture below shows... it is pretty.



A second positive piece about Ford and the cars it's putting out comes from the June 15 BusinessWeek and is titled "Can Ford's "World Car" Bet Pay Off?" About current efforts at the automaker to pull off the sought-after car company trick of one model that is sold (well) globally, it focuses on the Ford Fiesta... already a success in Europe and Asia and launching in the US early 2010.

The article talks about the Fiesta body lines being modeled after the BMW 3 series, but the Fiesta image below reminds me of a stubbier version of the Subaru Impreza (which I happen to own and like).



Very interesting stuff... from Ford. I'm surprised, in a good way.