Wednesday, January 11, 2012


Right after the last of the Holiday decorations have been packed away, and the din of New Year’s celebrations and Bowl Games fades into the past, it is, to the uninitiated, a quiet time of year. The lull between football and The Daytona 500 or Spring Training can seem deceptively quiet and uneventful. But those with motor oil in their veins… gears spinning in their noggins… and thoughts of rubber meeting road know better. This. Is. Car Show Season. And as usual, Ford is the star!

Running through January 22nd, The 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which we’ll just call the NAIAS from now on (to reduce the risk of a finger sprain with all those extra letters), runs the gamut from really boring to outrageous concepts that nobody would ever really build in a million years. But what that really means is something can be found for everyone at the show.

Before jumping to the extremes, how about some news from Detroit that you will actually use in your life? And of course, it’s from Ford.

The Ford Sync and My Ford touch are now superstar options in the industry, with other manufacturers trying to come up with matching technologies that always seem to look like weak copy attempts, or fall completely flat on their faces. So that probably explains why the early hit at the 2012 NAIAS is the Ford Fusion for 2013. As a matter of fact, it took less than a half hour for Consumer Reports to declare that with the Fusion, "Ford stole the show!”

Of course the new Fusion has SYNC and My Ford Touch, along with a new lane assist feature which helps you keep it between the lines, auto parking for parallel parking, blind spot detection, and adaptive cruise control, and c/net has an overview of the advancements. And autoblog has a good rundown as well.

Add to its style, all the technological advancements already mentioned to a Hybrid system update, or the ability to get an Ecoboost engine to save on fuel costs, and a plug in version, and it becomes obvious why Ford’s Fusion is already in the passing lane, and is set to accelerate past Camry in a big way.

Oh, and it looks great too!