http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2005/05/engineering_mar.html

This article from early May opined on what's happened to Ford Motor Company's Special Vehicle Team (SVT), an engineering 'skunk-works' group that took some mainstream products like the Mustang and turned them into genuinely impressive performers. That's what they did until the Ford GT supercar came along, anyway. It seems all eyes, hearts, minds and production schedules shifted to the $150,000 exotic which, when it hit the streets, was reportedly marked up to as high as $220,000.

The very limited production darling of Ford was expected to be a grand example of the 'halo' effect that draws customers—with small pocketbooks and large—to showrooms. The GT (someone had since bought and owned the namesake 'GT40' term, and Ford didn't want to spend $40 million to get it back) was also, for a while, the darling of the media—then disappeared mysteriously.

Turns out, according to a particularly interesting article in Car & Driver magazine, that more than a handful of recalls not only tarnished but sprayed graffiti all over the car's image. The most serious of the recalls—blamed on a manufacturing flaw—involved suspension control arms that could fracture. So potentially dire were the results of such a failure that Ford didn't just ask owners to get the cars back to dealers immediately, but called them (yeah, via telephone) and told them to park their six-figure toys. Says C&D…

"…the A-arm glitch was humiliating. Supplied by Citation Corporation in Alabama, the originals used a novel Japanese casting method nicknamed "squish casting" to achieve higher density in the aluminum. Although the same material and method of manufacture are already in use on some foreign cars, including Alfas and Porsches, the arms, as supplied, were inadequate on the Ford GT.

At the point the first cracked A-arm was discovered last December, only 448 GTs had been produced, according to Automotive News. Of those, 289 had been shipped to dealers and just 106 had reached owners' hands. Ford had the cars trucked back to the factory for the fixes."

So, I sit corrected from that previous blog item. While some of those opinions may be valid, perhaps John Coletti—SVT's charismatic leader—might have seen the handwriting on the wall and got out while the getting was good.

Well, if Audi can recover from its (unjustified) unintended acceleration debacle of the '80's, Ford should be able to recover from this one. Very unfortunately, however, this will likely be another case in which, perceptually or otherwise, the engineers will be blamed.