Ford's Underappreciated Sports Sedan: The Contour SVT
When you conjure the image of an average, everyday automobile in your head, that image will probably be a four-door sedan. Muscle cars evoke speed and brashness. Pickup trucks evoke work and ruggedness. Minivans evoke family. The four-door sedan, meanwhile, is your baseline vehicle. It has a multipurpose design that people can use effectively in just about any normal situation. They can just have bare-bones functionality, but they can also be luxurious comfort vehicles that stand among the most beautifully designed of all time.
Because a four-door sedan is such a malleable product, people will inevitably want to take that sedan and give it more power. Your traditional sports car doesn't fit the lifestyle of a lot of people, as it's typically a smaller vehicle, but some people still want to have that sports car feeling. Ford introduced the four-door sedan named the Contour in 1994, and three years into production, the company brought the upgraded version of the car called the Contour SVT to the marketplace. With this package, a person could blend the practicality of your average sedan with a surprising amount of power and performance generated by what was inside the car.
[Image by ATFIII via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]
A product of the Special Vehicle Team
Before a merger of several different branches in 2015, Ford had a division called the Special Vehicle Team. This part of the company was tasked with taking the existing cars on the Ford production line, such as the F-150 or Mustang, and ramping up the performance capabilities of the vehicles. In the early 1990s, they created the Mustang SVT Cobra and the SVT Lightning.
Their third model was the Contour. This front-wheel drive sedan was named one of the 10 best cars of 1995 by Car and Driver. It may not seem like the obvious candidate for a major performance boost, but considering it was slightly smaller than your typical sedan (which later Car and Driver gave as a reason for regretting that praise), it could very well masquerade as a sports car.
The SVT came in and boosted its 2.5 L V6 engine and upgraded things like the suspension to boost the Contour's 170 hp capabilities to 195-200 hp. Motor Trend, who found much to like about the upgraded sedan, reported that Ford predicted they'd sell about 5,000 units of the Contour SVT annually. However, they never reached that number, and in 2000 — the vehicle's last year in production — they only produced a little over 2,000 before shutting down the entire Contour production altogether. Just because a car gets good reviews doesn't mean it will catch on.
[Image by Jacob Frey 4A via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY 2.0]