Other media outlets were equally impressed, giving it cautious praise.īased on the DEW98 platform shared by the Lincoln LS and Jaguar S-Type, the Thunderbird was in good company. Motor Trend named it the Car of the Year in 2002. ![]() Little had changed from the original concept, prompting pint up demand and anticipation. Eager Ford dealerships would get them soon after September 2001. At $34,000 each, the 200 special edition cars sold out in a record time of two days. After creating a stir on the auto show circuit in 2001, the first cars were sold in Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog in 2000. The new car would go full circle and return to the Thunderbird’s two door convertible roots. ![]() That model’s big and unwieldy dimensions were popular at first, then went out with a whimper. The Thunderbird had been on hiatus since the last one in 1997. Ford’s own term to sum up the Thunderbird was “relaxed sportiness”. As times changes, seats were added and the dimensions grew, but the T-Bird was never anything more than comfortable, stylish personal car. The first Thunderbirds were probably the purest examples of the formula that worked best for Ford. While the Corvette was of course a real sports car, the Thunderbird was just a sporty looking personal car. It benefited greatly from the infusion of Ford’s Jaguar ownership, to the point that it could not be associated with Jaguar’s poor reliability circa pre-Ford ownership.Īlthough the Thunderbird was never a sports car (some years it almost was), it had been the top car in Ford’s line up for many years, almost like the Corvette is for Chevrolet. The final Thunderbird was perhaps the most accomplished mechanically of all. The eleventh and final generation of the Thunderbird had great looks thanks to J Mays neo-retro-futuristic design, but suffered from poor product placement and bad timing. Bitter, because Ford never gave it a chance and sweet, because the last T-Bird was closer in spirit to the original than any recent generation after the William Burnet “Early Birds” of 1955,’56 and ‘57. For the Thunderbird, the occasion was a bittersweet bookend to a long run of cars that changed with the times, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes the last of anything can be a sad affair. ![]() 2005 50th Anniversary of Ford Thunderbird
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