Here is today’s quiz for the kids. Imagine you’ve got $2k to spend on a car that you need to drive twice a week to get somewhere. Don’t need to impress the inlaws or deliver Uber-eats, this is just an occasional driver, but you want something other than a clapped out Civic/Camry you could get […]
The US market Ford Contour was marketed by the folks at Ford’s PR department as a re-purposed European Ford Mondeo, but in truth it only shared a few pieces including the windshield, windows, side mirrors and door handles. Everything else was standard parts bin junk left over from the Tempo or borrowed from the Taurus […]
The Ford Contour was a rebadged (and ‘Muricanized) US market version of the European Ford Mondeo — which people with funny accents claim was one of the greatest cars ever built. But Europe didn’t get the truly horrible American mass market Pintos and Vegas, so they didn’t flock to the reliable Japanese cars in the […]
The US market Ford Contour was marketed and sold as a US market version of the European Ford Mondeo, but in truth it only shared a few pieces including the windshield, windows, side mirrors and door handles. Everything else was standard parts bin junk left over from the Tempo or borrowed from the Taurus or Escort. That didn’t stop Ford from making an interesting SVT version that might be mistaken for another 90s domestic piece of junk, but it is a cool car and certainly a bit of a sleeper. Find this 1998 Ford Contour SVT offered for $5,500 in Albuquerque, NM via craigslist. Tip from Rock On!
The biggest complaint I have about this next car is the name. Say it out loud: I drive a Contour. An SVT Contour. Yuck. Contour. Blech. SVT Contour sounds like something you’d lookup in a medical encyclopedia and recoil in horror at the associated illustration. Ford should have kept the global name and called it […]
Merriam-Webster defines the word con·tour (n)| ˈkän-ˌtu̇r as (1) an outline especially of a curving or irregular figure (2) the general form or structure of something or (3) a usually meaningful change in intonation in speech. I wasn’t familiar with that last definition, but the fellows at Ford’s Special Vehicle Team put some contour into the 1995-2000 […]
The US market Ford Contour was sold as a re-purposed European Ford Mondeo, but in truth it only shared a few pieces including the windshield, windows, side mirrors and door handles. Everything else was standard parts bin junk left over from the Tempo or borrowed from the Taurus or Escort. That didn’t stop Ford from […]
The SVT variant of the Ford Contour offered tight suspension tuning on an already competent chassis to make one of the best-handling front-drive cars Ford ever sold in North America. However, its extra 25 horsepower over the regular V6’s 170 happened near redline, and torque remained the same at 165 ft-lb. Impatient, rev-wary owners rarely […]
The Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique were based on Ford’s CDW27 platform, a confusing amalgam of acronyms, but it was a global platform that was used to build the Europe-only Ford Mondeo and later the Jaguar X-Type. Take a workaday chassis and add a dose of magic from Ford’s Special Vehicles Team and you get […]