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Nineteen-ninety-nine was a pivotal year for the domestic automobile industry. For the first time in its history the Big 3 sold more light trucks than cars. The future of the large American sedan was looking bleak as more Americans were ditching cars in favor of more versatile SUVs and light trucks. That same year, Ford Motor Company initiated the Tall Sedan Program with the goal of reinventing the American sedan--creating a vehicle for people who needed more than just a car, loved what the minivan did for them but didn't really like the image and found true SUVs a little excessive.

"That's where the concept came from," says Amy Marentic, marketing manager, Ford Freestyle and Five Hundred.

And that concept led to the development of Ford's first true crossover and the off-shoot Ford Five Hundred and Mercury Montego sedans.

In the initial phases of the program, scientific research was used to help Ford define the people who made up this new segment. Ethnography, a descriptive study of human behavior as it pertains to technology, allowed the development team to virtually live with consumers.

"We put cameras in people's cars, we went out and rode with them," Amy says. "We paired them up with psychologists to try to get inside their heads and discover their unanticipated needs."

The team also had the luxury of seeing a lot of competitor's crossover-type vehicles come out before launch. Ray Nicosia, manager, Vehicle Engineering, says that they were able to evaluate some of the early entries to see what worked and what didn't.

"Clearly the Pontiac Aztek didn't do it," Nicosia says. "We saw some good points in the Honda Pilot and we found some things that weren't so great."

Nicosia says that the team saw the compromises that people were making to get the packaging flexibility of an SUV in a car-like product.

"This was our chance," Nicosia says, "to create a vehicle that didn't require compromise. The new vehicle needed to express all of the positive attributes and utility of an SUV with the ride of a large sedan."

With program approval in the spring of 2001 and with the vehicle's attributes now etched in steel, it was time to find the right architecture.

# posted by Medical Information : 5:56 AM