1979
Manual
Tax: £325
Mileage: 62,000
Petrol
We're now pretty used to car brands dusting off classic nameplates and re-inventing them as something else - but Ford does it more than most. Having redefined the Puma, the Mustang and the Explorer, the Blue Oval has now revived arguably its most iconic model name of all, Capri, a car not seen since 1986. In its old form, as your dad will tell you, the Capri was a blue-collar sports coupe, a genre now long-abandoned but popular when this Ford was first launched in 1969, with subsequent second and third generation versions in 1974 and 1978. In the years after, Ford often dabbled with the idea of bringing this nameplate back (with the Visos Frankfurt Motor Show concept of 2003 and a Focus-based hatchback design prototype in 2009); but it took the EV revolution to push the company into actually doing it. Modern electric Fords are redesigned Volkswagens and, like its showroom stablemate the Explorer, the Capri is a five-door crossover based on underpinnings borrowed from Wolfsburg's ID.4. But clothes them in a sporty silhouette replicating the approach of the Volkswagen ID.5. With the Capri though, there's a touch of nostalgia to go with Teutonic engineering that'll only ever be electric. Ford says this car 'continues the story of an iconic cult classic'. But how? Let's take a closer look.
With this car, Ford talks about 'revelling in the tension between something that got the equity of an older name and the new interpretation'. But tension there is, primarily because a modern family five-door EV based on a VW and looking like a Polestar could hardly be any further from this model line's low-slung two-door 1970s namesake. But of course we'll all get used to it, as we did with the Mustang Mach-E. And those who won't aren't target market for this car anyway. If there's a problem here, it's not that Ford has bought back and re-invented a familiar name; that's now an established Blue Oval policy. It's more that, unlike with the Mustang Mach-E, the company has marketed the re-birth of the Capri as 'the return of an icon'. But this isn't that; it's something quite different. Perhaps that's good. Ultimately, there's only one perspective that matters; yours.
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