By Colby Buchanan
I stumbled upon this today and after reading everyone’s reactions to the Woodie Bronco I want your opinion on this. I’m not too big of a fan personally but I feel like the artist hit a lot of the right elements. The squared body reminds me too much of the early 2000’s Camaros and the headlights throw me off a bit too. I like the Foxbody Mustang but I don’t think it would do well if it was brought back with the signature boxy body. Thoughts? And is there a different classic that you think would do well today?
Last Call indicates the end of Hooniverse’s broadcast day. It’s meant to be an open forum for anyone and anything. Thread jacking is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.
Jeff Glucker
Nice Charger coupe! 😉
Nice Tempo coupe! 😉
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/078a9642d8aa0859ff809f0e4e0b6192fb1c772bbb65f69b3b46b9e9e7fca47c.jpg
Wow, that is pretty much mid-90s Korean bland, or dare I say it could even carry a Mitsubishi badge? The tiny, lost wheels, the simplicity in where every design element goes…I love it.
https://consumerguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/91113621991214.jpg
*Looks around in case there’s a Ford Tempo Fanatic sighting*
I always thought of them as an over-inflated Ford Escort…
I’m pretty sure they were based on the original (North American) Escort platform, so over-inflated Escort probably isn’t far off the truth (or a bad thing, they were reasonably fine cars for the time).
Ford made just about as many Tempos as Volvo made 240’s, but there seem to be hardly any left on autotempest.com. Might be a crapcan destined to go away again, but I like very simple designs…from a distance.
My sister drove a black ’93 Mercury Topaz coupe in college. Dad and I put a ground-effect kit on it in attempt to keep it from looking so plain. It didn’t help much. The seatbelts in that car were infuriating.
Nice modern SN.95.
Agreed– looks like there’s more DNA from SN95 than Fox. It’s too… gelatinous.
So, despite being inspired by an LX 5.0 hardtop, it retains GT badging, even though that was the one Fox body style that never got to be a GT?
I play around with Photoshop too, and without an education in it, I find it difficult to come up with cohesive renderings of cars that aren’t just modest touch-ups. Designing an homage to something iconic like a Foxbody Mustang is even tougher.
I agree with the artist’s notion that the current Mustang looks angry compared to the bright-eyed Fox, but I don’t think a bastardized Mopar/GM front end is the answer. Looks more like a Dodge Avenger / Chevy Cobalt mashup than anything Ford would put out. The rear is okay, but rather than a nod to the Foxbody, it just looks dated.
It took Ford a dozen model years to bring the Mustang back up to Foxbody levels of significance, in my opinion (sorry SN-95, but you sucked). I’d love to own a ’93 LX 5.0 notchback– BaT had a low-mileage white one up for bid recently that sold for nearly $25k. If I were shopping for a daily commuter, I’d have been tempted.
I was a massive Mustang fanboy back in the early 90’s and just KNEW whenever the Fox body was replaced it was going to be something in the evolution of awesome. When the first renderings came out, I thought it looked like a Celica. When it turned out to be heavier, I was further disappointed. When they ditched the pushrod engine and replaced it with the more complex but no more powerful or efficient mod motors, I was pretty much done caring about them until the Mach I models back in ’03-04-ish.
In 1994 I bought an old Mercury down in South Carolina, and the lady selling it drove me to the local notary office in her new SN95 Mustang GT. I was very interested at first– being a brand-new redesign and all– but was left totally unimpressed, and even disappointed. Inside and out, it was just a stylized plasticky mess. I was happy to jump into my new-old 60s iron and log a few hundred miles home. New Mustangs didn’t even register on my radar again until the S197.
Does anyone else remember the two concept coupes that Chevy/GM put out a decade or so ago as design exercises or whatever? Enthusiasts loved them, but GM acted offended at their existence even though they created them and put out some press material that was well received. That episode has me completely jaded as to the auto industry and what it does or doesn’t do for enthusiast vehicles.
All that to say, there’s a big portion of “Don’t you give me hope!” in any kind of exercise that points at a basic high performance light-ish weight affordable RWD car. If you take a platform, maybe slightly larger than a Miata or BRZ/86/FR-S and put Ford’s 2.3L turbo 4 in it, it would kick ass and I probably wouldn’t care what it looked like as long as it wasn’t so severly compromised as to be difficult to see out of or other significant functional compromise for the sake of styling (looking back at you GM).
But whatever, they’re already putting the Mustang name on something that looks like an Escape that is more concerned with hip height requirements of aging customers than steering feel or the ability to execute a broadslide, (marketing efforts with Gittin and Block in a bespoke demonstration car notwithstanding, remember the Camry dragster?)
Yeah, the 130R? I had high hopes for that one, too.
This, let me be as generous as I can, is terrible.