Ford Thunderbird reviews

2002 Ford Thunderbird Driving Impressions

Driving the new Thunderbird is and will be first of all an exercise in being seen. It's a beautiful car that will attract attention wherever it goes. But how it goes is just as important, and it does pretty well in this category.

The engine is a direct lift from the Lincoln LS, with only a few modifications to make it fit in and under the car. It's a small V8, only 3.9 liters, or less than 240 cubic inches; it's a smaller V8 than the smallest one you could get in 1955, but it meets all the modern criteria for emissions and gets good fuel economy while producing 252 horsepower, more than one horsepower per cubic inch.

It's smooth, mechanically quiet, and ready to go whenever you need passing power, and the engineers have given it an interesting combination of air intake sound and exhaust sound. It burbles at idle like an old big-block engine, and that's part of the car's charm. The transmission, a Ford 5-speed overdrive, seemed a little reluctant to deliver quick, timely downshifts when we wanted them, but was transparent in normal driving. Expect 0-60 mph performance in the range of 7 seconds flat, which ain't bad, but then, you're supposed to be relaxing in this car, not racing around from place to place. If it weighed 500 pounds less, it would be quicker, but even with its mostly plastic body panels, the new T-Bird weighs almost 3800 pounds, and it feels like it.

The chassis that the T-Bird rides on is a combination of Lincoln LS sedan parts and a few new parts, including a steel tubing brace under the engine bay and a second brace under the passenger compartment and a third behind the seats to add stiffness and integrity to what is essentially an LS with no roof. Over a variety of paving types at high to very high speeds, we found the Thunderbird to be stiff, smooth and quiet, with very little evidence of cowl shake, that thing that usually happens when you drive a convertible over a large bump and the dashboard moves from side to side. The all-independent suspension, derived from the Jaguar, is slick and smooth without letting the car wallow.

The big, thick steering wheel is great to use and the rack-and-pinion steering is quite nicely weighted, giving you a pretty good idea what the Michelin P235/50R-17 quiet-ride luxury tires are doing at any given time. The car wants to understeer, of course, but there's nothing objectionable in the way the car handles, and in a couple of mountain passes with blind corners and tricky turns, the car behaved very well in correction and recovery, even though we were going way too fast for the corner. Yes, there is body roll, but not much. Traction control is available, but yaw control or electronic stability control is not available.

We had to jump hard on the brakes several times during our road test period with the T-Bird, and we can tell you that the all-disc system with ABS works very well, with nice, progressive pedal feel and lots of power in emergencies.