danup

It'd be bad business for Ford to do it, but I've always wished they'd bring this car out in the states. It'd be nice to have something less ugly than the Versa in that price range.

These still look great today—shame they ended up in Mercury and arrived at the moment FWD coupes were in what looks like a permanent decline. To this day all the New Edge cars have aged really well, I wish Ford hadn't given up on it as quickly as they did.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding here—Mulally isn't saying it's a viable replacement for your Ranger, he's saying that most people who bought Rangers bought them for reasons that don't track with yours, something Ford has probably done extensive market research about.

It's not that I didn't see it—I, too, can connect the one dot between the "concept" and the finished product, and have for some time. It's that I think this is representative of a mistake I'm worried Ford is about to make—going to an all-Europe-all-the-time model just as Volkswagen, for instance, has decided that it's not a viable option in the states.

The Fusion will be crucial, but the Kuga/Escape is officially the moment I start worrying about One Ford as it's currently constituted. This market's far more crucial to NA than EU and yet the "winner" seems like a European special. I realize everything about this says RAV4, and that's an extremely successful car in the states, but I'm just not sure One Ford is going to be as flexible as it needs to be—right now it just looks like the global cars are all primarily European in design.

This isn't exactly my style, but I like that it feels less fussy than the Fiesta interior.

Versa is a subcompact in pricerange only, and I can't see Fiesta catching what is basically just a very cheap compact car, but it'd be a minor disappointment if it can't catch Yaris, Fit, Aveo, etc. It's a better car—a much better car than Yaris and Aveo—it's competitively priced, and Ford has the most brand momentum on the planet.

I like this well enough, but the Explorer America concept was considerably more distinct than this—that line about having to send them back to the drawing board because it wasn't daring enough is a joke.

There's only one Kizashi on the local Suzuki lot, and there's been no more than two since it came out. Sad to see it, too—it looks like a nice car.

Well, I prefer it—but I also wouldn't say it's crappy, or "the same" on everything. The Cruze is my least favorite version (aside from the current Aveo); my favorite is the Malibu. I love the three-bar grille, and I drive a Fusion, so I hope this isn't the beginning of me not being a True Ford Fan or something; you don't get very far when you begin by inferring unknowable information from my one statement. But what I like about the Cruze is its simplicity relative to the Focus. That might be bland to some, but I prefer... the only word I can come up with is "broad" design cues. The Focus/Mondeo etc. aesthetic, with all its small-scale details, doesn't do as much for me as the look of the Edge and the Flex, for instance, does.

I prefer the Cruze's styling direction inside and out—wake me up when Kinetic styling is over with, please—but the Focus is likely to be the better car.

I love Paul Rand's work and I love this—I realize Ford's logo is too old to fail, at this point, but I'm not sure if that was true forty years ago.

The "anime styling" may be what does it but I prefer Mazda's current design language, at least in its toned-down production form, to Ford's nü-kinetic stuff, which still seems bland and fussy to me. The old Mazda 5 was dowdy, and this one shares what is honestly just a cheap-looking profile view, but the surface work is a big improvement.

I actually loved the egg-crate grille and (especially) the light bar, but these are handsome updates. The interior is great, too.

I love the sedan, especially the roof-line; the hatch is nice, much better than the last Euro-hatch, but all the exuberance of the original Focus design seems to have been wrung out of the last two. This one just looks like an Astra to me (again, not a bad thing.) Edit: on second thought I love the front three-quarters view of the Focus hatch, so maybe my problem is with the surface detailing on both models—the taillights on the hatch appear to have oozed into their current position and then hardened.