San Antonio Express-News All About Cars Column
By G. Chambers Williams III, San Antonio Express-News
Nov. 5–Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.
It’s also a good way to make money, especially if what you’re imitating is already a great success in the marketplace.
And that brings us to the latest product from Ford Motor Co.’s Lincoln brand, the 2007 Aviator.
Last week, Ford released the first photo of the production vehicle, an all-new, car-based premium crossover SUV that replaces the truck-based Aviator that has been on the market the past two years.
Guess what? In a side-by-side photo comparison of the new Aviator with the current Lexus RX 330, it’s hard to tell them apart.
I saw the resemblance immediately when I got my first look at Ford’s photo of the Aviator last week. But just how similar the two are didn’t strike me completely until I saw photos of both in the industry weekly Automotive News.
Copying a popular Japanese design isn’t a new thing for the automakers, though. In fact, the Japanese automakers do it to each other all the time, and apparently it’s not considered a bad thing to do in the Japanese culture.
I remember a few years ago seeing a popular Honda sedan parked next to another Japanese automaker’s similar-sized sedan in a mall parking lot and marveling over how much they looked alike. In fact, the taillights were so similar that I believe their lenses might have been interchangeable.
Some auto industry folks will tell you that most cars look alike these days because of computer-aided design and wind tunnel testing, which have largely taken the element of creativity out of the designing of automobile exteriors.
Computers can’t think for themselves, but when told to create something that has the least resistance to air, it makes sense that most computers will draw the same shape, which just happens to be the same general shape of most cars these days.
When the design is honed to perfection by the computer after getting input from wind tunnel testing, any remaining differences begin to fade away.
So it goes that if you’re designing a car-based crossover SUV, you might get the shape of the Lexus RX 330, even if you’re working on a computer owned by Ford Motor Co.
And it can’t be a bad thing to have a vehicle similar to the Lexus RX in one’s stable of new vehicles.
Just a few months after the first RX model, then called the RX 300, was introduced, that vehicle has been the best-selling model in the Lexus lineup.
Toyota, the parent of Lexus, didn’t plan it that way and probably never envisioned such success for the RX. The company just knew that it needed a carlike SUV in its lineup to complement its very nice line of cars and that dealers were weary of losing potential customers to other premium brands that offered SUVs.
But for the RX to become the best-selling Lexus had to be a great surprise, although a very pleasant one.
Volvo had the same thing happen when it rolled out the car-based XC-90 sport utility three years ago; it quickly became the best-selling Volvo.
Ford officials probably are hoping that this will happen for Lincoln with the Aviator that will be introduced in January at the Detroit auto show and will go on sale probably by early summer.
Lincoln needs such a hit, and this could very well be it. The previous Aviator never caught on with consumers for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which probably was that the vehicle was based on a body-on-frame truck platform. In this case, it was the platform of the Ford Explorer SUV — and it came at a time when consumer tastes for SUVs clearly were shifting to the car-based crossover models.
The original Aviator also had little to differentiate it from another SUV that was already being sold in Lincoln Mercury stores — the Mercury Mountaineer.
The Mountaineer itself was already just a gussied-up version of the Explorer, and it was hard to explain to customers why the ever-so-slightly-more-gussied-up Aviator was a good value with a price tag $10,000 or more higher.
Industry insiders knew from the start that Ford quickly added the original Aviator to the Lincoln line only as a temporary measure until a crossover could be readied. Ford executives knew as they rolled out the original Aviator that it really wasn’t the vehicle that Lincoln Mercury dealers wanted.
That is being fixed now, however, and dealers no doubt will be happy to have a Lincoln SUV that looks like a Lexus. And consumers who prefer to buy “American” probably will feel better choosing the new Aviator over the Lexus RX 330, as long as the quality is there. After all, quality is the hallmark of Lexus vehicles, and the attribute that most automakers would prefer to emulate.
The production version of the 2007 Aviator that Ford showed in the photo last week looks much more like the RX 330 than did the Aviator concept vehicle Ford introduced at last year’s Detroit auto show.
But it’s very similar to the concept, at any rate, so the production model doesn’t really come as a surprise. We’ve had a good idea of what it would look like for nearly two years now.
No further details of the production model have been released, and they won’t be until Ford introduces the car at the Detroit show in early January.
No on-sale date or price has been announced, either, nor have any EPA fuel-economy figures.
The new Aviator is derived from the chassis of the current Mazda6 midsize sedan, which also was the basis for three new Ford vehicles on the market this fall: the Ford Fusion, Mercury Milan and Lincoln Zephyr sedans.
Ford uses a 221-horsepower 3.0-liter V-6 engine in the Fusion, Milan and Zephyr, but it’s working on an uplevel engine option for the Zephyr for next year. And it probably would be that engine, or a variation of it, that would be used in the Aviator.
Because Lexus uses a 3.3-liter V-6 with 223 horsepower in the current RX 330, the engine from this year’s Fusion, Milan and Zephyr probably would work in the Aviator.
HYUNDAI WILL HAVE MINIVAN FOR U.S. DRIVERS, AFTER ALL: Hyundai has bowed to pressure from its U.S. dealers and decided to carry through with its earlier plans to add a minivan to its mix of models for the North American market.
In August, the South Korean automaker canceled plans to bring a Hyundai-badged version of its Kia Sedona minivan to the United States, saying at the time that it would instead develop a crossover sport wagon-SUV for American consumers.
The company had said just two months earlier that the new minivan, to be called the Entourage, would arrive next spring.
Most recently, the company informed its dealers during a meeting in Las Vegas that the minivan plan had been revived.
Company officials said they were able to make a strong business case for the Entourage, which was canceled in part because Hyundai felt that it would be hard to distinguish it sufficiently from the Sedona.
Dealers have been clamoring for the van because the company has no vehicles in its lineup that will seat more than five people.
The Entourage now is back on track to arrive in the spring and will have seating for up to seven. It will have a different look from the Sedona, with unique front and rear styling, and will come only in a long-wheelbase version.
Hyundai still plans to introduce the crossover sport wagon, which will seat up to six people, probably as a 2008 model. It will be similar in concept to the Chrysler Pacifica.
Meanwhile, Hyundai said last week that it also will bring a stretched version of its popular Santa Fe crossover sport utility to market later this model year, with a third row of seating. It will be able to accommodate up to seven passengers.
That’s probably in response to Toyota’s impending introduction of the third-generation RAV4 compact SUV, coming late next month as a 2006 model.
That vehicle, whose European version was introduced at the Frankfurt Motor Show in Germany in September, will be nearly 2 feet longer than the current RAV4 and will have an optional third row of seating.
Send your car questions or news of your club events to G. Chambers Williams III, San Antonio Express-News, P.O. Box 2171, San Antonio, TX 78297-2171; telephone (210) 250-3236; e-mail chambers@express-news.net.
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