This article is stupid on so many levels. All the design proposals done since Mays arrived have been great.
It's not his problem if his design department comes up with concepts like the Prodigy in 2000 and the public gets the '05 Five Hundred. The Explorer fisherman concept was his vision of what the Explorer should've looked like around '06. We get a friggin refresh instead that looks like crap. The Freestar sure as hell isn't his fault. He works with what he's given.
DeLorenzo's just playing dumb again for his convenience, to make another "wah wah I need to be an attention whore or I'll lose traffic"; well, you can only rehash the same diatrabe before people get tired of your act, and in the case of autoextremist, traffic for that site has decreased over the last months, and for someone who acts like he's all-knowing, he sure seems to conveniently forget this could've been the 500 had Mays had it his way.
Yes, the Prodigy concept was as Mays as you could get. Management was still afraid of the '96 Taurus fiasco, and this design seemed too "risky" for them, hence the 500 we all know, with the "classic american" one color interior and Taurus air vents in the back.
Then we had the 49, the 427, the GR1, the Continental, Zephyr, Messenger, etc. The results from Mays design department were clearly there. Who wanted the Mondeo to be built and sold here? Mays. Who rejected that "nonsense"? Management.
How funny is it that NA is the one getting the cheap cars? How come the 500 and the Mondeo have interiors that look similar and yet have opposite effects, perception-wise? How come the North american 2006 Ford Fusion has an interior that's worse than the one the european Mondeo had half a decade earlier?
For both GM and Ford, it's managements fault in NA. They've always been the ones stopping progress. Europe and Australia have proven that much.