The Ford of the Future: Longer, Lower, Wider
By DANNY HAKIM

Do American cars have to be lame? Some people are pretty sure the answer is no.

"I don't think the American auto industry lost the market to the Japanese," J Mays, the Ford Motor Company's top designer, said this week in Detroit. "I think we simply walked away from something we used to do very well."

This past week, when the world's automakers convened in Detroit for the press preview of North America's most important auto show, there were klieg lights, smoke plumes and deafening music. Engines roared, pretty girls were posted like Christmas ornaments around Ferraris and Porsches, and there were enough free liquor and cappuccino to propel more than 1,000 journalists.

Just as it has been every year for the last couple of decades, a subject of hand wringing among the executives and reporters was the struggle of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to make passenger cars that are credible alternatives to Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.

For Toyota and Honda, cars and sport utility vehicles are profit centers. The Big Three make money on S.U.V.'s, but they lose money on cars. This state of affairs has something to do with differences in the manufacturing efficiencies of Japanese and American companies and the fact that the Big Three plants are unionized while the American plants owned by foreign automakers are not. It has something to do with differences in the reliability of American and Japanese cars, though the gap at this point is mostly perceptual.

But much of the problem is that American cars strike consumers as ugly or bland, both outside and inside, for no justifiable reason.

Detroit executives have said lately, as they do from time to time, that they are really, really serious about building competitive cars. At Ford, Mr. Mays believes the best approach is to stop making cars that look like lesser versions of Japanese designs.

For the more conservative buyer, he is developing European-styled Fords, notably the Ford 500 sedan and the Freestyle wagon. Both will go on sale next year, and both might pass for easy-on-the-wallet Audis. (Mr. Mays came to Ford in the mid-1990's from Volkswagen, where he reinvented the Beetle and also worked as the top designer at VW's Audi unit.)

And then there are the Fords conceived in Mr. Mays's signature style, which he calls retrofuturism and which re-imagines the past with a glossy, updated veneer.

Mr. Mays's first retrofuturistic Ford was the Thunderbird, a car that had become so ugly that "it looked bad from any angle," as Ford's finance chief, Allan Gilmour, said recently. When Mr. Mays had his team go back to the Thunderbird's 1950's roots for its 2001 redesign, the car became an instant hit.

At the auto show this week, he offered two more vehicles in the same vein. Both are rear-wheel-drive, a feature of American muscle cars of the 60's.

A new version of the Mustang, the GT convertible, recalls the version Steve McQueen drove in "Bullitt," augmented with a kind of Vin Diesel, Gen-X-on-steroids aesthetic. The Ford 427, a long, boxy four-door sedan with smoothed-over edges, seems ideal for a remake of "Hawaii Five-0."

"Longer, lower, wider" is Mr. Mays's description of the 427, which is most sharply characterized by six chunky chrome bands that stretch horizontally to form the grille. "That massive chrome grille on the front couldn't be German if it tried," he said. "It certainly isn't the generic Japanese model of what an automotive sedan should look like. "It recalls the golden age of American automotive design."

While the 427 is a prototype that may or may not see the light of day, the Mustang will be completely redesigned for next year, and the version displayed in Detroit "is within spitting distance of the production vehicle," Mr. Mays said. Neither car is meant to be made in the biggest volumes, as the 500 is expected to be. But they could get people into Ford showrooms.

Ford certainly needs some fresh blood. The company's car sales fell 11 percent last year, compared with a 7 percent overall drop in sales of its S.U.V.'s, pickups and minivans. Ford's car problem has reached an almost tragicomic state in a new ad campaign featuring the aging Taurus, perhaps best known to many a trudging traveler who has rented it through Ford's Hertz division. In one television commercial, an executive type unwittingly gets into the back seat of a Taurus. It's his chauffeur's car, his own car being in the shop. He sizes up the back seat, sees that it has a center armrest — an armrest! — and looks surprised, even impressed.

"Look again," the ad urges.

FORD offers buyers the most generous incentives in the industry on the Taurus, financing plans in which the buyer pays no interest over three, four or five years.

"If you can give people something different that they want to have, maybe you can get their attention away from price," said Stephen Girsky, an auto analyst for Morgan Stanley. "J Mays stuff works. It's just a question of, `Can you get this stuff delivered on time and at a competitive cost?' "

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, a former child psychologist who consults with the Big Three on consumer tastes, contends that in general, cars "all look the same."

But that's not true of the 427, in his view. "This one is different," he said. "It has an identity. It's square, strong and massive."

He is less taken with the Mays Mustang because he believes that it is not linked clearly enough to the original.

Brad Barnett, 23, a Mustang enthusiast in Birmingham, Ala., who runs a fan Web site (http://www.themustangsource.com/mustangs), said that traffic on his site had risen from an average of 1,400 hits a day to about 15,000 since he posted pictures of the new Mustang.

"It's a love-it-or-hate-it design," he said. "Most of the older people I've talked to love how it looks like cars they dreamed of as a kid, but with new suspension and engine technology and without the mechanical problems a 35-year-old car would produce. Younger guys don't want to look like their parents, and they want a Mustang on the cutting edge of performance and styling."

So what does he think?

"I'm 23 and love it," he said, "but I grew up around classic 'Stangs and still love looking at them."