Real Estate Trends
Many prospects thus balked and walked when Contour arrived at a minimum of $13,300, over $1000 more than a late loaded Tempo. Ford tried to correct its mistakes for 1997 by adding a lower-priced low-frills Contour and scooping out the front seatbacks and rear-seat cushion for a little more aft legroom. Opt for an SE with desirable extras like ABS and traction control and you were well over $20,000, which was Taurus money. Ford had underestimated the price sensitivity of Contour’s target market, as telling a miscalculation as that tight back seat.
Though increasingly eclipsed by the likes of Honda and Toyota, several Ford cars did well in the early 2000s. Despite too many recalls, the front-drive Focus was an unqualified success, drawing more than 389,000 orders in debut 2000 and around 300,000 each calendar year from 2001 to ’04. But Focus was a masterpiece of space utilization, offering more passenger and cargo space than those earlier small Fords, as well as most of its rivals. This “big and tall” subcompact had a big job, being assigned to fill the market shoes of the Escort, ZX2, and Contour.
One of their first projects was an ambitious corporate reorganization dubbed “Ford 2000.” Announced in 1994, this aimed to mobilize all of the firm’s global resources to further improve quality, shorten product development times, and achieve greater manufacturing efficiencies. Arriving in spring 1990 as an early-’91 model, it was another “world car,” though in the same way as Probe. Meantime, Ford Division had redesigned its Escort for the first time since the 1981 original. Though it wouldn’t be evident on the road until middecade, Ford 2000 seemed a prudent plan in light of the automobile industry’s ever-increasing globalization.
Some statisticians also had Ford ahead in calendar-year volume for the first time since 1935, though the final score showed Chevy ahead by a mere 130 cars. For 1958, Ford countered all-new passenger Chevys and modestly restyled Plymouths with a glittery facelift featuring quad headlamps and taillamps, a massive bumper/grille a la ’58 Thunderbird, and more anodized aluminum trim. The Skyliner name returned in mid-1957, but on a very different Ford: the world’s first mass-produced retractable hardtop. Skyliner “retracs” became prime collectibles, and the retractable-hardtop concept made a comeback in the new millennium. Ford sold 20,766 Skyliners for ’57, but demand fast tapered to 14,713 for ’58, then to 12,915. The model was duly axed after 1959, a victim of new division chief Bob McNamara’s no-nonsense approach to products and profits.
With gotta-be-first types waving checkbooks and dealers seeing potential windfalls, market prices soared overnight, reaching a quarter-million or more by some accounts. Will we ever see its like again? There were even reports of owners blatantly “flipping” barely used GTs in pursuit of a fat, fast profit. But all this only adds to the mystique of a fabulous Ford that was gone way too soon, shot down by “Way Forward” cuts along with the Wixom, Michigan, plant that built the cars carefully and largely by hand.
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