Fairlane Coming; Windstar/Freestar Dead

According to Edmunds, Ford will build a tall wagon crossover which will be similar to the Fairlane concept, for the 2008MY. It will be based on the same platform that the 500/Freestyle/Montego share. It will have swing-out rear doors, rather than the mini-van like sliding doors (think of the new Fairlane screaming, "I'm not a minivan! I'm a crossover!"). If the Fairlane is based on the 500 platform, I would expect it to ship with the Duratec 35 3.5L V6.

The stale Windstar/Freestar/Monterey minivans will finally be allowed to go extinct around that same time. Besides being stupidly named ("Freestar" vs "Freestyle"), the Ford minivans were not sufficiently good to break out, and can't gain traction against the segment leaders: Honda, Toyota, and Chrysler. Since Ford wasn't able to play ball, they finally decided to go home.

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