How come ford never made a competitor to the corvette or viper???

>hot hatches
>small cars

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K-cars in general were pretty good too.
The Neon was one of the best selling small cars in america though i don't know how Cavalier sales did. the Neon also beat the shit out of almost every other hot hatch that came to the US and almost BMW M cars.

Because Ford has had a major European/UK presence for decades and that's where all of their hatches come from. GM and Chrysler were for whatever reason never willing to sell their Euro models in the US except right at the end of Saturn when they started rebranding Opels but it was already too late for the brand.

>Saturn
forgot to mention Saturn cars (before they started rebadging opels) were good to and even employed very innovative body panels and chassis structure.

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If the Neon SRT4 was so great then where the fuck did it go?

I'm a GM guy, I love me some big trucks and musclebarges, but their small cars are disposable garbage. They push some crappy car, make it for a few years until people catch on to how crappy it is, then make something else and the cycle repeats.

They were good when they first came out, and then GM in their typical bean counter idiot fashion refused to update them for years and years until nobody wanted to buy one. Probably the most pathetic waste of a promising brand in recent automotive history, and doubly a shame because we could have had a whole bunch of cool VXR models and stuff had GM started calling them Saturns a few years earlier.

The oldest Ford Thunderbird, while not considered a sports car but a "personal luxury car" back then, was a Chevy Corvette fighter back in the 50s. Even preformed better than the Corvette at the time. I wished Ford kept battling the Corvette with the Thunderbird as time went on.

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>If the Neon SRT4 was so great then where the fuck did it go?
The Neon name was brought back, there likely won't be any SRT4 models because the same engineers who built those cars probably no longer work for Chrysler and they wouldn't know how to go about making a "hot" version.
I really didn't want any of Opels stuff to be called Saturns since i believe that's where the brand started to take a nose-dive. they should've updated Saturn's in-house designs and gave those performance trims and saturn would've easily built a name for itself as a cheap domestically produced reliable economy brand.

forgot pic

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IMO the brand was already terminal at that point. GM NA at the time just wasn't able or willing to make competitive small cars, so rebranding Opels was probably the best thing they could do. Had they tried to do domestic designs they probably would have ended up with a rebadged version of this POS.

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>they probably would have ended up with a rebadged version of this POS.
>he doesn't know that existed.

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They probably came to the conclusion that high performance Mustang models would do the job well enough

will this gen neon be to the late 2010s what the second gen was to the early 2000s?

Oh right, I forgot the Ion was a thing. It's kind of a prime example though, it was quick but was behind its competitiors in every other way when released and yet stayed on the market for half a decade after that. Compare the Ion or Cobalt to a Civic of the same year and it's pretty apparent why Saturn died and GM went broke.

I would take any chrysler product over any econobox ford. I've dealt with fiestas, mondeos, focuses and sierras and all of those cars have been fucking terrible.

Should also mention that the Volt/Bolt are also successful (and reliable) small electric cars and are the 2nd or 3rd best selling electric cars behind Tesla and/or the Leaf in the states.
GM NA were very able to make competitive small cars and the Saturn S cars were a success for the most part however GM infighting brought that to an end. the *only* thing they needed to do was to continue to shell out money into Saturn like they been doing and let Saturn's engineers do their work but they wanted to cut corners and that's what fucked the brand. they wouldn't have had to rebadge anything and it could've payed for itself as the brand was steadily picking up steam. they should've also pushed to sell them in European markets like Chrysler did the Neon where it could've become a global economy platform. the Neon sold pretty damn well in Europe despite not being that good of an economy car. Saturn was good with digging their way into the Euro market and GM has always tripped over themselves with that. if Saturn had GM's money with Chrysler's level of footing into Europe it would've been a guaranteed success.

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>Saturn was good with digging their way into the Euro market
Chrysler*

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Chevy had the Cavalier z24 and Cobalt SS, why they haven't stuck the base camaro 2L 4banger into the Cruze is beyond me
Madman edition:
>Cruze hatchback
>260-300 HP
>E-lsd
>Magna ride from Caddilac/Camaro
>AWD from Buick

>why they haven't stuck the base camaro 2L 4banger into the Cruze is beyond me
Becuase it would've stepped on Buick's toes. Buick had a sister car to the Cruze called the Verano, which was available with a 2.0T with 250 HP, and a 6 speed manual.

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Depends on how you saw the 2000s Neon. its unlikely to be associated with performance in any way like the last Neon or dominate in motorsports or make a bit of a name for itself in the tuner world with a fairly beefy engine like the last did. the new Neon will likely just be a generic clapbox with none of the cool quirks the original had at least. i definitely miss when Chrysler and Cheppy were more experimental with small cars.
That' was a competitor to Ferrari or in general a competitor to the best in the world at the time back when Ford needed heavy duty trucks to carry the amount of balls they had. miss ballsy ford too.

They were too busy making the Ford GT, which costs at least 4 Corvettes and some vipers.

And they sold all 500 of them.

>and heres why thats a good thing
powerful

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>Implying they're capable

No they don't. You're not some automotive enthusiast when you give a fuck about pointless shit

Op said Ford, not Lotus.

yea but

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Never needed to put the R&D into it, probably not enough of a profit to even care, the Mustang sells well enough to where they don't need to care.