Ford was the Belle of the Ball at the Detroit Auto Show with the global premiere of their mid-size car, the 2013 Fusion. Yikes! What a surprise; considering that Ford, General Motors and Chrysler only really cared about pick-up trucks and big SUVs for years. If you wanted a family sedan you shopped for Toyota Camry, a Honda Accord, a Nissan Altima and recently a Hyundai Sonata. The Detroit Three just weren't competitive in that great big segment of the car market.
Times have changed. The new Fusion, which you won't see on the road until late summer, looks like a winner. It won the People's Choice Award at the auto show probably because of its great styling; after all no-one outside the company has driven this one yet. GM has brought Buick back to life with some excellent new cars and Chevy will launch an all-new Malibu later this year. This is significant because if you look around Canada and the U.S. today you will notice only about one-third of the cars are from the Detroit automakers.
What's the new Fusion got going for it? According to Chris Hamilton, the Chief Exterior Designer, it's the proportions. "We didn't want to create a boring mid-size car, we wanted to create a beautiful product. It looks expensive even though it isn't." Hamilton's a 43-year-old Brit who had spent most of his career in Europe. His Fusion design does seem to shatter the stereotype of bland, American passenger cars that we've become accustomed to seeing lined up at the rental agencies.
The origins of the car are interesting too. The process began about four years ago while GM and Chrysler were teetering on bankruptcy while Ford mortgaged everything they had to raise money to keep going. Even in the darkest days Ford spent their borrowed money on engineering and design - and for cars, not just trucks. We've seen the compact Focus and the sub-compact Fiesta that came out of that investment and now comes the mid-size Fusion.
It is a great looking car from most angles. It has the suggestion of an Aston Martin in it with a raised up trapezoidal grille, thin stretched headlights, sloping roof and muscular stance. And the interior is even better. Hamilton's right; the car does look much more expensive than the twenty to thirty thousand bucks it is expected to sell for.
Ford is dropping the V6 from their mid-size, as many manufacturers are doing, and will offer three four-cylinder engines and two hybrid versions - including a plug-in. It can also come loaded with tempting and expensive optional equipment such as Ford MyTouch which is the voice activated control system which understands more than ten thousand words plus new sensors, cameras and radar to give you Lane Keeping, Adaptive Cruise Control, Active Park Assist and Blind Spot Warning.
The Fusion will also be North America's first mainstream car available with Stop-Start. By shutting off the engine when the wheels stop turning you can save up to ten per cent of your fuel in traffic clogged cities. What the Fusion doesn't have, at least not yet, is a station wagon version. But the Fusion is a global car; this one will be sold unchanged in markets all over the world. It was engineered to pass everybody's crash standards. In Europe they'll call it the Mondeo and European love wagons. So they'll get one.
I'll drive the Fusion just as soon as it's available and will report back. But the fact that Ford has a mid-size this good, the fact that Chevy is coming with a Malibu which I expect will be great (based on the quality of the current one), the fact that Cadillac is coming with the ATS which they swear will be as good or better than the BMW 3 Series, the fact that Chrysler is introducing the Dodge Dart, which is basically an Alfa Romeo, all proves to me that Detroit - Motor City - is finally developing a car culture again.
