2006 Ford Futura Sprint GTA Wagon

2006 Ford Futura Sprint GTA Wagon - Forty-three years have passed and now comes another Futura Sprint, only this one’s a wagon based on the all-wheel-drive Ford of Europe platform that currently underpins the Asia-only Taunus and, of all things, the SEAT Toledo minivan.

But forget all that. What’s important about the Futura Sprint is that wagons are apparently again in vogue, despite the best efforts of Detroit marketers, who have, in recent years, applied the term “crossover” to so many models that the transgender community raised holy hell from Cleveland to Cedar Point.

The car’s New England designer, Emmett L. Brown, apprenticed for J Mays, and the two have long agitated for a wagon “from the early Beach Boys era — a woody without the wood.” Brown’s best-known previous creations include the Ford Cinnamon concept shown in Turin and — laugh if you will — a $900 art deco countertop radio for Panasonic that made it all the way to the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art.

The dash and the IP are perhaps too relentlessly retro, with five memory pushbuttons on the radio and a push/pull headlight switch that doubles as a dimmer. Two of the steering wheel’s spokes are swathed in chrome, two are highlighted with what Ford swears is genuine teak veneer, and one is so populated by redundant radio controls that we don’t know what its surface is supposed to resemble.

The Futura Sprint GT/A is no rocket but does easily keep up with, say, a Chevy Malibu Maxx for the length of the quarter-mile. The car is more at home on a road course or skidpad, where its 17.5-inch Fulda Redcoats grip like Iowa chiggers, assisted by unflappable standard-issue Monroe triple-adjustable shocks, independently toggled to one’s preferred setting via a chrome rheostat next to the ashtray. The settings are imaginatively named. In order of firmness they are: Harbor Freeway, Santa Monica Boulevard, and Mulholland Drive. Brown reports that the original idea was for the firmest setting to be called “Good Vibrations,” but the marketing mavens nixed it.

The cushion on the Futura Sprint’s front bench is hewn from a single piece of high-tech memory foam that somewhat embarrassingly displays the exact contours of your backside for up to three minutes after you’ve departed. But the seatbacks — in keeping with the SoCal beach motif — are fashioned from the same webbing deployed so successfully in the costly Herman Miller Aeron office chair. We found those seatbacks stiff and unyielding, but at least they breathe and, like the cargo bay, are easily cleaned with a soapy scrub brush.

The somewhat featureless and uncarpeted cargo bay is a utilitarian touch in what is otherwise a stroll down Whimsy Lane, but it also seems to amplify road noise and echo whatever is on the radio — good if it’s Andrea Bocelli, bad if it’s the Mumps. The cargo bay looks as if it might swallow a surfboard, but no one surfs on the Detroit River, so we’re not sure.

Blue-oval execs say they’re aiming the Futura Sprint GT/A wagon at “the hip and clever 20-somethings who comprise the audience for reality TV shows.” To that end, they’ve contrived a bold new pricing policy that may prove too clever by half. Buyers must purchase the Futura Sprint in what Ford calls “provisional segments.” For instance, the chassis ($13,560) is naturally mandatory, as is an engine ($1150 to $2200, depending on output).

The Futura Sprint GT/A wagon is half the car that Ford intended but 108 percent the car that youthful singles at one time might reasonably have predicted. As such, that same old truism obtains: You can’t take to the bank what you still owe.