SVT was founded in 1991 by Robert Rewey, Ford’s vice president for marketing and sales, and Neil Ressler, Ford’s chief technical officer with the ideal in mind to take Ford cars to make a specialty high pefformance vehicle out of them.

SVT will leave behind the SVT Cobra Mustang, the SVT Lightning Pickup, the SVT Countour, and the SVT Focus. The SVT engineers are gone, all marketing is gone, the trailer is gone, the press fleet is gone, and the top chassis engineer has been sent to the fuel cell program.

In 1992 SVT released versions of the Ford Mustang Cobra and the F-150 Lightning pickup. The SVT Countour was introduced in 1997 followed by the Focus they released in 2002. In total, 145,000 SVT products were sold.

After the yanking of the Adrenalin from the SVT lineup, the drought continued from 2004 to present, with nothing new being released from SVT. The Way Forward plan evidently did not align well with the concept, and Thai-Tangs recipe for shaking up the performance vehicle market soured quickly.

Ford’s latest card played in the performance segment is the 2007 Shelby GT500 not an SVT endorsement; rather, one blessed by Carroll Shelby. As far as the future goes, market enthusiasts will have to cater to secondary developers and custom crafters (Saleen, Roush, Steeda, Foose, Coddington, etc) for the high-speed addictions. The 2007 GT500 will still carry the SVT logos because it is to late to delete them.

Special Vehicle Team
Born 1991
Died 2006