Ford is done making boring cars

[roket]

They should bring back the Crown Vic/Grand Marquis with the 5.0 Coyote, and the Marauder with the supercharged 5.0.

oh man, the Marauder. i remember my dad had a black 2003 Mercury Marauder. that thing was awesome and quick for what it was. i still remember a time when he had caught air from a bump in the middle of an intersection, and when he landed, one of the rear springs broke. thats quite a memory from ~17 years ago right there

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[SweptVolume]

In the UK at least, the late 1990's was peak Ford (IMO, of course), and this video kinda sums up what was great about Ford back then: cheap as chips, styled in a way that appealed to car people and non-car people alike, and drove better than most cars costing 2 or 3 times as much. The new Puma is such a disappointment by comparison. HOWEVER, this era of Fords rusted terribly, so they'd do well to avoid their materials and assembly practices of the time.



Ford need to find themselves another Richard Parry-Jones and grant him/her carte blanche to make cars that appeal to everyone again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Parry-Jones

 

[Wiley Marmot]

440-480 HP 2 seat Mustang; 3200lbs (or less!); with a more classic dash array, and an HUD.

 

[DeluxeStang]

One of the biggest issues I see with Ford designs is they either go WAY to far (anyone recall the "more ovals" of the 96 era Taurus) or just way too slab sided and boring to look at box cars.

Look at BMW, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc. While I admit that some are probably very boring to drive, they at least "look" nice. Especially compared to what Ford and GM have done recently.

Car people consume in multiple ways which include (but I am not listing all of them)...Looks, reliability, fun to drive, sound, carries the load it needs, etc. Again, NOT an all inclusive list, there are many others.

That said, Ford has created cars (as opposed to SUVs/trucks) that were not fun to drive, boring to look at, and had poor reliability. They made forgettable...or sometimes unforgettable (in a bad way) cars.

If Ford wants to stop making boring vehicles, they need to apply design to stuff other than trucks (the Super Duty series looks good) and SUVs.

Many folks like "muscular" cars. This is not just the drivetrain, but also the design. They want a strong/beautiful vehicle. Exotic is good to. The GT looked great, but it was out of reach of too many.

People also like well put together vehicles. Inconsistent body gaps, the need to take it in for repairs months...or days after picking it up, constant trips to the dealer for fixes needs to stop. Saving money by using inferior parts, worn out molds, or not using/updating systems so that you have a well manufactured car is a false savings. Even if you make it over the 36k/3yr mark, if you car is in the shop 2-5 times over the next 2 years, people will not be coming back...and once you lose a customer, you lose that customer for life and maybe that of their family as well. Imagine losing 2 generations of car buyers so badly that they won't even consider your cars when they shop...

Fun to drive is optional for your every day people movers. A camry or accord will not be "fun to drive", but if they look good, and don't need fixing, it will work for a mass market sedan that moves hubby to and from work. Mom's usually also want "practical" and SAFE thrown into the mix as they are usually the person carting the kids around. When the roles are reversed, the vehicle desires tend to be reversed as well.

That said, there are also the performance addicts like myself who still want a V8 AND 4 doors. I want a car that can go around the corner and I want a car that can take off down the road when it's done with the corner. It's people like me that want performance and looks, and will give up a little reliability to do so (but not a lot of reliability....so it's still in your interest to get it right)

Just my two coppers.

I personally find every car company you mentioned worse looking that Ford's designs. Ford and Mazda are the best mainstream brands at the moment when it comes to design imo because they create stuff that's really clean, and eye catching at the same time.

 

[BrianJ77]

Can I get a big block (Godzilla?) in a big 2 door i.e. Torino or Galaxie 500? Oh, and bring back the Probe! We need fun 2 door cars again.

 

[LaMakina2]

Bring back the iconic Chevelle 427

 

[DontHitMeSafetyYellow]

I have to say that I loved my 97 Probe GT and would love to see an updated version of that but it would likely be too much of a competitor with the Eco Mustang so would bleed sales off.

A quick inexpensive Escort Hybrid 4WD might be cool too.

They really need something in the entry level space again to bring in the young buyers and get them Ford hooked.

 

[DontHitMeSafetyYellow]

One of the biggest issues I see with Ford designs is they either go WAY to far (anyone recall the "more ovals" of the 96 era Taurus) or just way too slab sided and boring to look at box cars.

Look at BMW, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc. While I admit that some are probably very boring to drive, they at least "look" nice. Especially compared to what Ford and GM have done recently.

Car people consume in multiple ways which include (but I am not listing all of them)...Looks, reliability, fun to drive, sound, carries the load it needs, etc. Again, NOT an all inclusive list, there are many others.

That said, Ford has created cars (as opposed to SUVs/trucks) that were not fun to drive, boring to look at, and had poor reliability. They made forgettable...or sometimes unforgettable (in a bad way) cars.

If Ford wants to stop making boring vehicles, they need to apply design to stuff other than trucks (the Super Duty series looks good) and SUVs.

Many folks like "muscular" cars. This is not just the drivetrain, but also the design. They want a strong/beautiful vehicle. Exotic is good to. The GT looked great, but it was out of reach of too many.

People also like well put together vehicles. Inconsistent body gaps, the need to take it in for repairs months...or days after picking it up, constant trips to the dealer for fixes needs to stop. Saving money by using inferior parts, worn out molds, or not using/updating systems so that you have a well manufactured car is a false savings. Even if you make it over the 36k/3yr mark, if you car is in the shop 2-5 times over the next 2 years, people will not be coming back...and once you lose a customer, you lose that customer for life and maybe that of their family as well. Imagine losing 2 generations of car buyers so badly that they won't even consider your cars when they shop...

Fun to drive is optional for your every day people movers. A camry or accord will not be "fun to drive", but if they look good, and don't need fixing, it will work for a mass market sedan that moves hubby to and from work. Mom's usually also want "practical" and SAFE thrown into the mix as they are usually the person carting the kids around. When the roles are reversed, the vehicle desires tend to be reversed as well.

That said, there are also the performance addicts like myself who still want a V8 AND 4 doors. I want a car that can go around the corner and I want a car that can take off down the road when it's done with the corner. It's people like me that want performance and looks, and will give up a little reliability to do so (but not a lot of reliability....so it's still in your interest to get it right)

Just my two coppers.

ou know, there’s another side to this as well. When you look at the cars on the street, so many of them are same couple boring colors - black, silver/gray, beige/tan, brown, dark blue… very few vibrant colors like reds, yellows, greens, (yuck orange and purples). Why is that?

Well, when I was trying to order my 2024 I put in a build for a yellow. A few weeks later I found what I wanted option wise, but in silver on another dealers lot so I bought that and let the first dealer know that I no longer needed the build. I told him when it came in they could just sell it to somebody else. He said “no, we will cancel it because we don’t carry yellow cars on our lot”!?!??

How can they expect to sell what they don’t have on the lot? How many sales are lost for reasons like the dealerships not grabbing setups with the options people really want and people not being willing/able to wait for a build or to hunt for it elsewhere? I VERY rarely am able to find cars with the options I want on them at dealer lots. They NEVER build them out the way I want them. How much does the way the dealers configure the cars they order from Ford skew Ford’s picture of what customers really want? Case In point we lost a number of color options in 2025 vs 2024 - why? Was it because Ford decided those colors didn’t sell well? Did they not sell well because the customers didn’t want them or because the dealerships didn’t order them and thus the customers COULDNT buy them?

 

[MaddNomad]

Wishful thinking but I feel like they should bring back SVT and have the Mustang be the flagship to it. They also should bring back some iconic names from other Ford markets to take on the world since those markets created something special.

For example:
Mustang (2 door sports car flagship)
Falcon (performance sedan)
RS/Focus (AWD)

Ford has the potential to do cool stuff but they make weird decisions.

 

[Supraman]

I would buy a 5.0 4 door tomorrow if I could! Cars/trucks are stupid expensive now.
I have a 2012 Boss 302 (original owner) with under 30k miles.
I’ll never sell it because newer stangs are $50k++
If they built a 4 door, 5.0, manual I would trade my F150 and have 2 fun cars.
Current Mustang is unrealistic for people with a family. And who is buying the new GT/Darkhorse? I’m 40 years old and make an excellent income…
We need a sporty car for parents who will later upgrade to the specialty Mustang in the future after kids

When I saw the thread title, I thought "What! No more SUVs? - Gotta be clickbait." Oh well, you got me.

My previous daily driver (and now occasional) is a 2012 Jaguar XF 5.0. I figured when I bought the XF that it would be my last V8 sedan, the way everything was going to smaller engines. With the changes at Jaguar, it'd be risky but a used XF, based on the Ford DEW platform, is probably as close as you can get to a 4-door Mustang. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've carried a back seat passenger in the XF so I didn't want another sedan.

Now in my late 50s and no kids to haul around, what I really would like is if Ford had continued making personal luxury coupes like the Thunderbird, Mercury Couger and Lincoln MkVII from the 90s. Throughout my life I'd always bought luxury cars used because the massive initial depreciation hit made them a bit of a bargain, but yeah now, if Ford still had a new v8 personal luxury coupe priced in the $50s to $60s, I could not have written a check fast enough.

Don't need 400+hp tho. Not going to the track. Smoothness and a pleasant exhaust note would be paramount. The S650 could almost be made into a personal luxury coupe. The top spec has pretty much all of the luxury features that you'd normally find in one except for manual steering column and seatback adjustments. All they'd have to do is stretch it a few inches, detune the v8 to about 375hp, soften the suspension a notch, and re-skin it so it could be called a Lincoln (or a Thunderbird for us relatively poor people).

I don't know where they get the idea that everyone needs or wants a 4-door tho because my parents generation was the last to have big families. My generation and later stopped at like 2.3 kids and spread them apart because of what a huge struggle it would be to put more than one of them through college at a time. Now that they're on their own, wouldn't it be peaceful to waft about lazily in a big Lincoln coupe, occasionally floor it and leave the rank and file behind? Oh yeah!

 

[BrianJ77]

I have to say that I loved my 97 Probe GT...

They really need something in the entry level space again to bring in the young buyers and get them Ford hooked.

Hence why Ford needs to bring back the Probe as a Civic Type R killer. They could do some cool stuff with it, and should put the 2.3 Ecoboost with a 6 speed manual transaxle. That would be awesome! Bonus points for AWD version.

@Ford Motor Company do you hear me?

 

[DontHitMeSafetyYellow]

Hence why Ford needs to bring back the Probe as a Civic Type R killer. They could do some cool stuff with it, and should put the 2.3 Ecoboost with a 6 speed manual transaxle. That would be awesome! Bonus points for AWD version.

@Ford Motor Company do you hear me?

Yeah.... But for the love of god make it RELIABLE! Mine was great.... right up until year 7 (I had a 7 year / 70K miles extended warranty on it) when one of the valve lifters wouldn't hold pressure and I had a knocking sound of the valve hitting the head for the first 2-3 minutes the engine ran until the pressure built up. Dealership had it for a MONTH and couldn't fix it. I sold the car immediately after. I was lucky... Another buddy had the same car and his literally had every single problem you could imagine at about the same time/miles... The car practically fell apart. Incredible number of electronics and engine and transmission problems all happened in like 1 year on it.

They were fun as hell cars to drive though! My new 2024 Ecoboost reminds me a lot of that Probe, but with even more power. That's why I suspect they wouldn't bring it back because it would overlap with lower end Mustangs too much and rob sales from each other. It would need to be a very different Probe platform.

 

[S650RaceRed5.0]

The fox body Mustang could be brought back and ran in parallel with the S650. Call it the “Fox”. Could be a compact Mustang. Just saying!

Ford, you getting this?

 

[smurfslayer]

Hence why Ford needs to bring back the Probe as a Civic Type R killer. They could do some cool stuff with it, and should put the 2.3 Ecoboost with a 6 speed manual transaxle. That would be awesome! Bonus points for AWD version.

@Ford Motor Company do you hear me?

Oh.
My.
GAWD!

No!!!!

leave the ‘hot hatch’ segment to the the hot hatch makers.
Ford, make a no compromise, no apologies serious performance car that you don’t need to take out a 2nd mortgage for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Fairlane_Thunderbolt

There’s no replacement for displacement here. No complaints if it’s in a Mustang but let’s not have another boring $130k car here. Run it off the assembly line in numbers so we don’t have to deal with BS stealerships overcharging for them.

You can do this @Ford Motor Company
The Dark Horse is already incredibly capable. Now, get busy.

 

[DeluxeStang]

Oh.
My.
GAWD!

No!!!!

leave the ‘hot hatch’ segment to the the hot hatch makers.
Ford, make a no compromise, no apologies serious performance car that you don’t need to take out a 2nd mortgage for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Fairlane_Thunderbolt

There’s no replacement for displacement here. No complaints if it’s in a Mustang but let’s not have another boring $130k car here. Run it off the assembly line in numbers so we don’t have to deal with BS stealerships overcharging for them.

You can do this @Ford Motor Company
The Dark Horse is already incredibly capable. Now, get busy.

Which is why a new RS 200 would be perfect. 80s nostalgia is hot right now, AWD all weather supercars are hot, reasonably priced mid-engine cars are flying off the shelves. So an 80s inspired AWD supercar priced at around 70 grand seems like a no brainer. The c8 sold around 50 thousand units last year if memory serves right, it's not far behind the s650. The average transaction price has to be a lot higher as well.

The affordable mid-engine car segment is one of the only ones Ford doesn't compete in, and it's one that can make your company billions of dollars in revenue if you make something appealing. The issue is lots of companies are phoning sports cars in right now, and wondering why they're not selling. Give us something with wow factor for a price that's reasonable, and it'll sell.

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