Ford says SVT still alive

Reports of SVT's demise have been grossly exaggerated, or so Ford Motor Company says. Mark Fields, Ford's turnaround guru, said at the New York Auto Show the company will offer a beefed up Mustang and a speedy truck via its SVT brand, and should sell 5,000 to 10,000 of each one. The truck won't likely be the Explorer Sport Trac Adrenaline, which was sacrificed to The Way Forward gods. The Mustang Fields refers to is obviously the Shelby GT500, at least in the short term. Recent variants of the pony car indicate that anything's possible for another SVT variant to replace Shelby's tire shredder.

Additionally, Fields told Automotive News that the marketing groups for SVT and Ford Racing have been combined.

Fields was responding to reports by the media that SVT would be history after April 1st. We reported on an article published at Inside Line by Steven Cole Smith who seemed utterly convinced of SVT's demise. We even spent 20 minutes in photoshop we'll never get back making that clever graphic for the post. Regardless, it's good to hear from the horse's mouth that Ford's onetime shining star is still glowing through the haze of restructuring.

[Source: AutoWeek]