I was in Las Vegas end of March and one of our stops was the Shelby American HQ....part of the tour took us to the garage area and the place was loaded up with new Mustangs waiting to be made into Shelby Mustangs. Several were already in bays being worked on...

I think your not seeing the forest from the trees my friend-that Patent drawing is showing a substructure that would hidden by other sheet metal that makes up the actual styling of the vehicle.   Its like looking into the engine bay of the Escape and noticing that all the substructure (shock towers/firewall) are identical to the Focus   The C pillar of the patent drawing could be modified (well at least to me) into a truck/hatchback/CUV as needed without having to change the hardpoints needed for crash protection etc. 

No matter what settings I use, my ad blocker and Autoblog just do not mesh....Autoblog constantly tells me to pause my ad blocker app and even when paused for the site, it will continue to demand I pause my ad blocker. 

Just thinking here, Shelby builds and sells its own Mustangs, so it raises the licensing fee until Ford says, OK you build all your own Shelby’s and we’ll use another name. Both parties get what they want.

Those buttresses out back make it look like a Mach-e

Coming back to it, whatever this is looks to be about the size of the maverick/CE1 truck. I wonder if this is the CE1 design or some sort of proposal for a next gen maverick. 

That would save money, but they'd look pretty terrible lol. Like if they did a sedan that has the proportions of the truck just with a sedan roofline or something. I'd rather see everything having its own unique design so it's less compromised. 

Profit on mustang coupe is somewhat irrelevant since it's a Ford Icon.

What even is Ford’s margin on mustangs? I imagine whether it be $800 or $4,000, that would take a fat shit on it if not totally remove

I currently own an Escape and I actually kinda agree. I really like my Escape, I think it’s well made and designed, and I love the Ford hybrid + awd. But it’s not really compelling. The reason I bought it was because I work for a union and prioritize union-made; I was in the market and the Escape is just the only UAW-made hybrid awd vehicle that doesn’t blow up (Jeep). That is personally compelling to me but that’s very niche/ideological and also not to do with the actual car. There is not really a reason to buy an Escape over any other option without incentives.   Ford is left with two options, either do the very hard thing and try to beat Chevy’s price or Toyota’s quality+cost structure (excluding Honda because they’re taking a beating rn), or do what Subaru is doing with the Forester, Jeep would do with the Cherokee if they weren’t incompetent, or Hyundai/Kia does with their creative designs and differentiate in some way. I think the result of that is the Bronco Sport, which honestly is a good replacement for the Escape it just needs a hybrid drivetrain. Its not car-like, but the solution to that is Ford just making an actual car which they at least nominally want to do.