Because I have a couple of Great Danes who live in my house and use my backyard as their stomping grounds and personal toilet, there’s no shortage of opportunities to yell “Fore!” on any given day as a swift swing of my golf club sends a frozen blob of Great Dane excrement sailing through the air. Of course, one has to be careful not to select a fresh doggie dropping -only frozen solid ones will do. A whack or two with the golf club gives me a chance to work on my golf form while I aim for the corner of the yard where I’m planning on building a raised flower bed next spring. It’s a win, win, win situation. I’m entertained for a few minutes, my yard gets cleaned up, and the future site of the raised flower bed will have some fertilizer for spring. Should you elect to try poo golfing yourself, I accept absolutely no liability or responsibility for an y accidents or disasters that might occur, just FYI. So, if you get a little over zealous with your nine iron and sent a frozen turd through your neighbor's window, or end up striking a passerby with a dog poop torpedo, it's not my fault -there, that's my disclaimer.
In view of what I use my golf club for, you may have surmised that I’m really not an avid golfer. It’s true.. But, when I think of golf and consider the fact that I need to write a blog post one of these times, there is a specific car that springs to mind: the Ford Five Hundred, offered from 2005-2007.
As sedans go, the Five Hundred is about as generic as it gets when it comes to looks. Given that the name is a reference to cars like the Galaxie 500 and the Fairlane 500 (the first car my dad gave to my siblings and I to drive in high school was a 1963 Ford Fairlane 500 two door hard top), one might expect something exciting or surprising design-wise. Well, surprise! The car is super boring! It slotted in as a full sized sedan that offered huge interior space without resorting to being the size of a barge. While its exterior was boring, and its performance even more so, the one thing people liked about these cars back when I was selling them was how much trunk space they had. Golfers in particular would carry on about how easy it was to fit their golf bags in the trunk. Some claims indicate that a person can fit 8 golf bags in the space, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn't doubt it.
You might be expecting me to start ripping a new one for the Five Hundred…. And I could, because it was ever so loosely based on a fantastic concept car Ford made in the early 2000’s called the 427. The 427 was a rear wheel drive, slab-sided, full-size sedan with strong style lines and a road stance reminiscent of a brick on wheels (albeit a very cool and bad-ass brick). In a sense, Ford had designed the Chrysler 300.… of course, they didn’t follow through and put it into production, and so the actual Chrysler 300, which sure looks like it was cribbed from the Ford 427 made its splash while the dowdy and tame front wheel drive Five Hundred production car, with its unimpressive 3.0L V6, 203 HP and 207 lb-ft of torque limped its way out of production after a span of just 2 years.
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In 2008, the same car was brought back with a tri-bar grille, which was what Ford decided was the telltale attribute of their latest design DNA. In the place of the underpowered 3.0L V6 was a 3.5L V6 good for 260 HP and 245 lb-ft of torque. The car revived the Taurus name plate, which had been set aside when the Fusion took that car’s mid-size sedan slot in the lineup. Now, the Taurus represented Ford’s front wheel drive full size while the Crown Vic was still hanging on to its status as a law enforcement darling and RWD full size sedan.
The thing is, I liked the Five Hundred. It wasn’t exciting or thrilling, but it had a certain serenity about it that I really appreciated. It wasn’t until I had to take a mini road trip in one of these cars the I really realized this, though. Before that, whenever I had people come in looking at the Five Hundred, or its twin, the Mercury Montego (later replaced by the Sable name plate revival before Mercury went away entirely), I would always have them also look at a Fusion or a Milan as well, because they were a step down in size, but offered the same 3.0L V6 engine option, and the ratio of size to power was much more satisfying in the smaller car. After that trip I took though , I started to rethink that strategy.
I had been going back and forth for months with a young guy named Caleb who wanted to buy an F-150. He was a secretive kind of guy who would only drop clues about what he actually wanted. Every few weeks, he would pop up in the lot, looking at our inventory. Caleb had plenty of cash, but he refused to buy a brand new truck, insisting that he wasn’t going to take a depreciation hit like that if he didn’t have to. He would rather bide his time and wait for the perfect truck to make its way to him than spend the extra cash on a brand new truck that was just the way he wanted it. He wouldn’t say exactly what configuration he wanted in terms of super cab vs. super crew, long bed, short bed, etc or what trim level he wanted. He would just say that he would know the truck when he saw it. I knew he liked nice options like leather interior and heated seats, so I figured it wasn‘t worth my time to show him anything less than a Lariat unless there had been some extra option boxes checked when the truck had been made. Caleb claimed not to be picky about paint colors, but if you presented him with a color that wasn’t the mystery hue he had in mind, he would turn his nose up at it.
Finally, we took in a practically new F-150 Supercab Lariat in dark green with gold/tan rockers and wheel flares and tan leather interior with heated seats and all the goodies. I took some pictures and sent out an email with the list of options. Sure enough, Caleb turned up in the lot at the dealership one night, ready to look at that truck. We took it out for a spin, he liked it, and we struck a deal. He upfitted the truck with some extras from the aftermarket department, and we scheduled a date and time we could get it in for outfitting.
So it was that the day came when Caleb’s new used truck was due for its date with the aftermarket department, where it would be fitted with \ a bed liner, running boards, and a Truxedo topper on the bed. Caleb was at work in a city about 40-60 miles away, and due to some crisis or other, he couldn’t leave to bring his truck in. It was winter, it was snowing, and the roads were icy and nasty. I decided after so many months of back and forth with Caleb to get him to just settle on a truck, I wasn’t going to let this get drawn out even further, and I knew he was already unhappy that he had to wait over a week to get his truck in to be fitted with the stuff he ordered for it anyway. Rescheduling would just push it back that much further, so I decided I’d bring him a different car and take his truck in for its appointment. I cleared it with management, and grabbed the keys to the first AWD used vehicle I spotted out on our lot. That vehicle happened to be a nearly brand new jet black Ford Five Hundred Limited with AWD and a Chrome package that included a glittery chrome mesh grille and shiny 18” wheels. The car had been purchased just a short while earlier by a guy who almost immediately found himself and his brand new pimped-out five hundred in the midst of a storm that produced golf ball-sized hail -kind of appropriate for a car that specializes in transportation of golf equipment, don‘t you think? Whatever insurance policy this guy had, it was a good one. It had some kind of clause that replaced his car with a brand new one just like it due to the fact that his original brand new car had taken on damage so soon after being purchased. So, the first Five Hundred wasn’t totaled, and all the damage was cosmetic, but it was replaced in full anyway. Our dealership ended up with the original Five Hundred with the hail damage, which our body and collision center repaired so that the thing looked new again, and voila!
So, I’m driving through a minor snow storm in a loaded -up AWD Five Hundred. I’ve got the seat heaters going, I’m listening to satellite radio and the navigation system is telling me how to get to where Caleb is with his truck. I’m suddenly struck by the notion of how calm and lovely it is to be cocooned in a car like that when there was so much foul weather and lousy road conditions outside. I felt as secure as I’ve ever felt in a vehicle, knowing that it was a big car with plenty of room inside for me, lots of crash space, a great safety rating, and a fantastic feeling of being steady on its feet with its Haldex AWD system working its magic to propel me through the snow. I felt enveloped in security and comfort, and suddenly, I understood why people would buy a Five Hundred. It wasn’t a car that was meant for making a scene or a grand entrance. It wasn’t designed to peel out or race, either. This car, even with its blinged-out chrome bits was unpretentious. It was an outright family sedan, meant to safely transport its occupants and their luggage in comfort and security. Its unassuming design can be considered bland, but it’s also reassuring, because this car isn’t trying to be something it’s not. It has a job in mind, and it does that task well. For those reasons, and for how sure footed that Five Hundred was that day, driving to a place I’d never been before through not so great conditions, I love the Five Hundred. It’s not fast like a Mustang, but that’s not its goal, anyway. That car was about being steady and sturdy instead of fast and flashy. I finally got it.
The truck I sold Caleb was nice, but swapping cars temporarily with him and driving back to the dealership in the F-150 made me miss the Five Hundred. When one of my coworkers sold that black Five Hundred a short while later, I was sad to see it leave our lot. It had become one of my favorite cars, which is actually saying something considering we had a lot packed with all manner of toys ranging from huge custom lift trucks, to Saleen Mustangs, to the Ford GT on top of our used inventory that included a BMW 7-series, a Maybach, and a range of Cadillacs. The Five Hundred was one of those cars that had to be experienced in just the right context to be appreciated. They’re gone now, of course. The Taurus is still around, and if you’ve read my older post about driving the SHO, you know I’m somewhat fond of it, so it’s not like the passing of the Five Hundred was all that bad. To be honest, the car could have been better, and it could have been so much more if Ford had taken its 427 concept and ran with it. But being what it was- a Five Hundred -turned out to be not such a bad thing, after all.
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