2013 Ford Fusion
Game On! Ford Attacks the Midsize Segment with EcoBoost, Hybrid and Plug-in Hybrid Fusions
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From the March, 2012 issue of Motor Trend
By Todd Lassa
| Photos Jim Frenak
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So it's no surprise when Chris Hamilton, the British exterior design chief of the all-new, 2013 Ford Fusion and Mondeo, says this: "We put a lot of emphasis, to create something that we think will be different in the marketplace. We'll have a sophisticated feel. We'll be elegant. We'll be somewhat unexpected in North America, from Ford, and we'll set ourselves apart from Camry and Accord ... We wanted to create a beautiful-looking car. That's always been our number-one objective."
J Mays said in our November 2011 issue that the production 2013 Ford Fusion unveiled at the 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit would borrow heavily from the Evos concept revealed at Frankfurt last fall. As on the Evos, the large, expressive six-point lower fascia from the Focus and Fiesta has been moved up the nose to become the Fusion/Mondeo's grille, the headlamps are narrow slits that avoid the bug-eye (not to be confused with the Austin-Healey Sprite's) lamps infesting the rest of the midsize segment lately and the fast roofline gives the car an almost four-door coupe' look.
Our first look came so early, in fact, that the car was really more Mondeo than Fusion, with a metric speedometer (okay, perhaps it's Canadian), with taillamp trim and other details that had yet to be finalized. We hear some final design details were still to be worked out after the NAIAS unveiling. With the official on-sale date about eight months away, it's clear Ford was eager to pull its unveiling forward early enough to make the Detroit show.
In normal times, the plug-in hybrid version would be enough to distinguish the Fusion in this segment. Despite all the talk of Americans downsizing to compact cars, the midsize segment is heating up, fueled by Ford's much-improved quality scores, Toyota and Honda's natural and man-made troubles and new models from South Korea and VW stepping in to relieve supply shortages.
It's clear, too, that Ford noticed when enthusiasts wrote into motortrend.com online forums and in our letters section of how they'd take that last Mondeo over the 2006-12 Fusion, any day. Shortly after the first Fusion launched, Alan Mulally started the One Ford program, with corporate brass recognizing the cost-saving advantages in combining mainstream European models with mainstream North American models, while figuring that Americans finally are ready to buy global cars.
"It's not an evolution of today's Fusion. It's something different. It needed to be new. And it needed to be perceived as new. I find [Malibu] more evolutionary. We didn't want to do that at all."
If not for all the equity Ford has built for the Fusion name in the last six years, it could have taken the Mondeo name.
"From a design point of view, we weren't necessarily thinking about just Camry, Accord, Malibu, those sorts of things. We were thinking about all the global inputs. We were taking into account inputs from outside the segment as well, from BMW and Mercedes," he says.
Easily said if you don't care about function and interior space, this segment's raison d'etre. Hamilton's design team managed to inject that sort of styling without degrading interior space. The front seats are as commodious as expected, but so too are the back seats, which have ample headroom and legroom for a six-footer. The back seat seems wide enough for three adults in a pinch, though as in most competitors, the rear of the center console, with its rear-seat vents, seems to encroach on the unlucky adult who gets the middle seat. It's competitive with the '13 Chevy Malibu, which has good rear seat room despite a shorter wheelbase and faster roofline than its predecessor. Ford needed to avoid the mistakes it made with the 1996 "ovoid" and current Taurus, which both have tight rear-seat headroom, especially for ingress and egress.
Though various editors of varying height will have to cycle through the rear seat to give a definitive opinion, Your Humble Servant had no issues getting in and out of the back.
That ovoid Taurus and its immediate successor, you'll recall, were in the Fusion's d-segment -- or c/d-segment as Ford prefers to call it -- when Ford dropped the name and replaced it with the Fusion for the 2006 model year. Before CEO Alan Mulally brought the exclusively North American Taurus back to replace the full-size Five Hundred, it had been an odd kind of midsize duck itself, V-6 only and a bit larger on the outside than the Toyota/Honda competition before their midsize cars grew in overall length.
The new Fusion joins the Hyundai Sonata, Kia Optima, Buick Regal and '13 Malibu in scrubbing V-6 engine options. Ford has replaced the SEL trim level with Platinum, befitting the new car's richer look. The high-volume SE and the straight-to-rental S trim levels remain. The SE line has two sub-trim packages, Appearance and Luxury, to gum up this simplicity. (The sidebar on powertrains endeavors to sort this out.) Platinum takes SEL's space atop the lineup, though like the Focus Platinum, it's premium enough to compete with Buicks, and could easily be priced just below where the next Lincoln MKZ will start.
Read more: http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/sedans/1201_2013_ford_fusion_first_look/viewall.html#ixzz1ppGNcUOb
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