2002 Ford Thunderbird Review (continued)
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Walkaround

The new Thunderbird features design aspects of the original 1955 car, the 1962 car, and some other, earlier Thunderbirds, but Ford doesn't want to talk about this car in terms of retro" design because it has so much modern equipment going for it.

The exterior design is extremely smooth, to the eye at least, but the wind tunnel says it has a drag coefficient of 0.38, which is quite high these days when a Mercedes sedan cheats the wind with a rating of 0.28.

The trunk is big enough, despite the small numbers, to carry two golf bags, but that's about it. This car is made for what Ford calls "relaxed sportiness," a term we translate into "cruising." It's sporty looking, but it is not a sports car by any stretch of the imagination."

Interior Features

Two reasonably comfortable bucket seats are independently adjustable with power switches located on the side of the seat. Because this is a two-seater, with a sort of open cargo bay and a wall behind the two seats, there are limits to the adjustability of the seats, and if you are very tall or very long in the torso, the car will not fit you well with either the soft convertible top or the removable hard top in place.

Instruments are beautifully rendered in the T-Bird, much like the 1955 car, with long Sea Foam Green needles pointing the way instead of red, white or black needles. The center stack, that portion of the instrument panel at the center of the dash that carries the vents, the sound system controls and the heating, ventilation and air conditioning controls, is taken almost directly from the Lincoln LS, one of the Thunderbird's two sister cars (the other is the Jaguar S-Type); it's made up of five different small panels, though it appears that one nicely done cover panel for all five elements would have sufficed.

In such a small interior, everything falls readily to hand, you don't have to stretch to reach anything, and for couples, especially, the interior is intimate and romantic, with the T-Bird's spreading wings portrayed on the two door panels.

The example that I drove was all black, including the entire interior. But the Bird is available with a set of red, yellow, or blue color accent packages for the interior, as described above. I liked the red, but did not care for the look of the plastic on the lower dash panel and door trim panels with the yellow or blue packages. The red, and the smaller packages in yellow and blue, without the door panels and lower dash, are fine.

The brawny, thick steering wheel, complete with cruise control buttons built in, feels terrific in your hands, even after an all-day white-knuckle high-speed cruise, and there is a standard power tilt and telescope feature to help you feel one with the car.