My first car was a Pontiac Parisian Safari station-wagon. Not only could it cruise I-5 all day, but I once hauled eleven people and a drum set from Sonoma County to Sacramento and back. When one of the cylinders lost compression, the attempted engine rebuild was a testimony to the strength of our relationship. Before the block cracked, the Safari provided my family, friends and I with nearly three hundred thousand miles of motoring bliss. Sadly, the SUV craze and seat belt legislation killed off the full-size American station-wagon. Aside from the chop top, third row deficient Dodge Magnum, Ford’s Freestyle is the closest the Big 2.5 has come to reviving this classic, all-American ride.

Last Wednesday, Standard and Poor’s downgraded the Ford Motor Company’s credit rating.  “We expect the company's financial profile to weaken further during 2006,” S&P declared. “A period when the US economy and U.S. light-vehicle sales are robust."  So, good market, bad products.  After spending a week driving an Explorer Sport Trac, I’m inclined to agree.  Any automaker misguided enough to try to sell this vehicle in the world’s most competitive light truck market is heading for a fall.  

There I was, stuck in traffic on the 710, just north of Compton.  The 95-degree California sun bearing down on the Ford Focus had completely overwhelmed the chiller.  I phoned TTAC HQ. “I’m ready to start a Ford Death Watch.  This car is a disgrace!  It’s… un-American!”  Calm down, RF told me.  Never mind the heat, feel the handling.  Thrash it a bit and see what you think.  Think?  How can you think when there’s a brain-splitting noise coming from the engine bay that sounds like a small washer inside a metal band-aid tin wrapped in paper bags shaken by a cruel, malicious gremlin?  At that point, even F1 handling wouldn’t have saved the Focus’ bacon.   

What's the difference between a rental car and a mass market motor? Not a lot. But this much is true: the new Fusion's headlight switch wouldn't seem out of place on an EASY-BAKE oven. Actually, Ford should be so lucky; Kenner has sold over 16 million cookers since the feminist's least favorite toy debuted in 1963. The probability that the Fusion will deliver similar amounts of EASY-PROFIT depends entirely on the Y factor. Why would anyone buy an automobile that's had any hint of personality professionally removed by a crack squad of cost-conscious engineers? Purchase price? Reliability? You tell me and then we'll both know.

If customers swim into their local Ford dealer's fishbowl to spawn between $17k and $21k on behalf of a new Fusion, they won't be doing so because the sedan's sheet metal haunts their dreams– unless it's a nightmare about being pursued by a giant razor. The Fusion's three-blade front foil is the car's only attempt to make a visual statement; to my eyes it looks as if it's saying "I want to be an Infiniti when I grow up". From any angle other than the front, Ford's family four-door is so generic that the binocular fusion required to scan it hardly seems worth the effort. To be fair, the Fusion's Euro-blanditude obscures its proletarian roots with unrelenting unobjectionality. How great is that?

Explorer? I just met her. And you know what? I like her. I know: falling in love with a 14mpg SUV at this precise moment in time is like getting engaged to the boss' daughter a week after the old man's been indicted by the SEC. Still, Ford's provided plenty of justification for the love that dare not speak its name. Less poetically, they're giving them away! Arrive at your local Ford dealer on a rusty bicycle with a note promising to pay a hundred bucks a week, and I reckon they'll hand you the keys to a new Explorer in less time than it takes to pump $50 worth of premium down its steel-lined gullet.

I'm sitting at a traffic light on a nine-lane road bisecting a blight of car dealers, warehouse eateries and chain stores. My opponent is driving a white Elantra with almost enough body mods to disguise its humble origins, but not quite. I can hear the Hyundai's hamster wheel whining over the top of the Mustang's bellowing V8. Clearly, the Korean whip has about as much chance of outrunning the GT as an octogenarian jogger. And yet Elantra Boy is determined to get it on.

Applebee's. Outback. Red Lobster. Mediocre eateries are carpet-bombing America's landscape with the sort of scorched-earth expansionist verve that would chafe Sam Walton. How is that, exactly? To a chain, most such restaurants have been designed to look, feel, and taste the same regardless of locale. Accidental tourists who dined in a Scranton Ruby Tuesday's have a sporting chance of finding the bathroom in the Seattle franchise without asking the waitstaff. Outsized, filling portions dominate, with the quantities served constituting something of an apology for the food itself. And yet, to gorge oneself stupid on basket after basket of Riblets is to leave feeling strangely bloated and unsatisfied.

So it is with Ford's new Five Hundred. Make no bones about it: Dearborn's 'Year of the Car' centerpiece is no gourmet's feast. More to the point, the Five Hundred is a blandly flavored proposition inside and out, enticing consumers on portion size, a smorgasbord of ingredients and a low price point. Like the themed restaurants in front of which it will inevitably park, the Five-Hundred is a blatant attempt to appeal to the lowest-common denominator, blueprinted to offend as few as possible.

The first time I gave the Ford GT's go-pedal a really hard shove, I discovered that it's one of those rare cars that can transform its pilot into a passenger. In other words, when I dipped my right foot that little bit too far towards the floor, I found myself hanging on, rather than driving.

I'm not a cowboy, farmer or gardener. I don't build or repair things. I don't own a motorcycle, skimobile, ATV or boat. If I buy something too big to fit in my SUV, I have it delivered. In other words, I'm not a pickup truck kinda guy. But when my local paper's editor asked me— a writer who considers a triple digit sprint down a German autobahn a religious event— to review a truck, I went and got me a truck: Ford's F250 "King Ranch".

I chose it for the name. Texas' privately held King Ranch is larger than my home state of Rhode Island. And so is the King Ranch pickup truck. Obviously, this four-door Super Duty variant doesn't occupy 1300 square miles of real estate. It just looks that way. Parked on a driveway, its roof clearance lights glinting somewhere in the stratosphere, the King Ranch makes an average-sized American house look puny. It's the automotive equivalent of that endlessly annoying punch line, "Everything's bigger in Texas!"