- The Ford lightening is one of my favorite cars ever.
It inspired many OEMs to build fast trucks of their own,
and its influence is still felt today.
(upbeat racing music)
If the Lightning didn't prove
that people wanted fast trucks,
Ford would have likely never produced the Raptor,
which has imitators of its own.
The Lightening occupies a strange place
between ahead of its time and timeless.
But what if I told you it had a sibling that was
even more groundbreaking, but never saw the showroom.
The lightning truck was supposed to have
an SUV sister named Thunder, (thunder sounds)
but it never happened.
Why haven't I, a huge fan of fast Fords,
heard of this thing?
Why was it killed?
Was it middle management meddling,
bean counter budget restrictions?
Why hasn't anyone talked about this car?
No joke, what I learned forever changed how I see Ford.
We're going to find the Thunder.
Like any story in quarantine,
this all began with a video call.
I was talking to an industry insider for another project
when they let it slip that they worked with Ford
back when SVT was still a thing.
This piqued my interest because I'm a Ford fan
especially of the SVT cars.
SVT stands for special vehicle team.
They were a division within Ford whose sole job
was to build hot rods that Ford could sell to the people.
They built some pretty awesome cars like
the SVT Cobra Mustang, the first gen Lightening,
the second gen Lightening, the SVT Contour, the SVT Focus,
more SVT, Cobras, the Ford GT, and the first Raptor.
If you're a Ford fan, these are some of your favorite cars.
Maybe one of the coolest things about the SVT lineup
is that they were truly meant to be attainable.
The second gen Lightening cost
about 45 grand in today's money.
Which is pretty good when you consider
that dealers usually want around 70K for a Raptor today.
My industry insider mentioned that SVT had worked on an SUV.
Which was weird because I never heard of this project.
I needed to know more.
I went to Google and found just five articles
on the project FIVE, and some of them were duplicates.
I went over to YouTube and I didn't find anything.
I got really excited.
This was my chance to break a story two decades old.
I'm going to find this freaking truck.
Using my connections I was able
to get in touch with John Coletti.
Who is SVT's chief engineer from 1994 to 2004.
If there's anyone who could tell me about this SUV
and knew where it was today, it was John.
He laid out the formation of the SVT division at Ford.
- You got to give credit to two people
and these are high level executives; okay.
And Bob Ruley was the vice president
of sales and marketing at Ford.
So he kicked it off and there was a gentleman
his name was John Plant.
John plant was the first SVT marketing manager.
He worked for Bob Ruley and he was asked to
put this organization together back in Iran.
I'm going to guess around 1990...91.
- SVT was situated as its own division within Ford
complete with their own sales and marketing team.
Separate from what John called the mainstream Ford company.
Oh, you listen to Ford. I'm more of an SVT fan.
You probably never heard of them.
I mentioned earlier, the SVTs goal was to build hot rods,
but it's actually little more complicated than that.
Ford strategy was to use SVT as a sort of polish
on the Ford Oval, using specialty products like
performance cars to make the Ford brand more sophisticated.
- When the person sits in the interior of the car
he should feel like he's in a special car.
So we paid special attention to the seats.
All the touch zones, we call them
the primary control touchstones.
The steering wheels were unique.
We put a nice leather on there.
We put nice leather on the shifter
to give the guy a feeling as soon as he got in the car,
that he was special.
There was something unique about this car,
a unique instrument panel, for example.
So, you know, in that context
that's what the engineers were striving for.
- This sounds like pretty standard fare for an OEM.
Many manufacturers employ the same tactics today,
when they want to make an unassuming car more attractive.
I mean, just look at Mazda or Honda.
But something a lot of brands typically don't do
is aggressively pursue the kind of people
that would buy enthusiast cars.
- We wanted to create a special sales experience,
a special service experience.
He was already pre-sold on the product,
but now the experience was
you need to handle them in a special way.
Usually most dealerships would have one
or two people that would sell the SVT product.
- So what exactly was the SVT product?
I thought the team just bolted on some go fast parts
and called it a day, but it turned out
that was another false idea of mine.
SVT was actually a lot more methodical than that.
- The SVT product had to have a significant horsepower
increase over the base model that it was coming from.
Normally with performance vehicles, you always ended
up with what people consider pretty harsh ride.
You know, you really want to tighten
up the suspension and everything else.
We wanted a supple ride. It doesn't need to be a
teeth jarring harsh ride.
- SVT was exacting in their approach.
They had to make their cars perform better in every way,
but still engineer them to be comfortable and reliable.
So the customer could actually drive the car every day.
Anybody can throw some coil overs on a car
but the real magic, the real skill is engineering
something that doesn't become a chore to drive.
Believe me, that is no easy task.
I've ruined the ride on a few cars
by changing up the suspension.
You know, that's probably a good thing
I'm not in charge of a performance division.
Yet. I can see it now Donut performance group.
Were putting spinning things on everything,
slam everything got louvers on the back,
It comes with a free T-shirt.
That's a million units sold right there.
So through the 90s and early 2000s,
SVT was putting out banger after banger.
All of them classics, even the Contour.
I mean who doesn't love a compact sedan
making 200 horsepower that's sick.
But how did SVT choose their
next project in the first place?
Well, that process was actually pretty straight forward.
- You know, the fact that we were kind of limited
to the Ford lineup of vehicles,
we were always looking for what can we do with the SVT rank.
Can we put an SVT brand on this particular
kind of product or that product.
- After working their way through most of Fords 90s lineup,
it was only a matter of time until SVT set their sights
on one of the largest vehicles at Ford at the time,
the expedition.
Hell yes, this is it this is what we came for.
The brainstorm for this idea must have been next level.
A supercharged meeting of the minds so powerful
you can hear tires screeching, smell the exhaust
in the air as the team realize their genius.
Or so I imagined.
- One day, I remember when he says, "Hey Coletti
mind if we put a lightening motor in a expedition?"
I said, "well, that ought to be interesting right?"
And so they did it.
And that's where the Thunder came from.
- You know, you always hear stories of people
like John DeLorean, secretly building cars for Pontiac,
or someone extending the line graph onto the wall
writing a few dollar signs to convince the higher ups.
But it's not always that interesting.
Sometimes a guy named Coletti just says, okay.
The build process was super simple.
Since the F-150 and the expedition used the same platform,
SVT engineers took the suspension and drive train
from lightening, through the parts, into the expedition SUV.
This is why I was so excited to hear about this car.
This is a natural combination like peanut butter and jelly
or pineapple and ham you get the savory practicality
of an SUV and that sweet sweet power from a supercharged V8.
Let me know what to think about Hawaiian pizza
down in the comments. I welcome your opinion.
The newly formed Thunder made 360 horsepower
and 440 lb-ft of torque and send it all to the rear wheels.
This honking SUV to zero to 60 in 5.6 seconds.
Nearly four seconds quicker than a stock expedition.
Talk about hauling groceries.
- I still remember we were at Milan Drag way,
and we had rented the track for something,
And the guys brought the Thunder out.
It had three row seating so we had what
eight people in, and it still ran a 13.87.
And I said, "that's pretty damn cool
you can put eight people in the thing, right?"
Still run a sub 14 second with a full-size SUV.
- Not only was the Thunder quick, but SVT also
fitted a lightning style bumper and wheels to the car
which totally completed the look.
I gotta be honest choosing between this or the
Lightning would be like choosing between pineapple or a ham.
I just, I can't, I gotta have both.
Today fast SUV's are everywhere.
The Thunder was way ahead of the curve.
Ford would have set the pace for the industry once again.
The origin story for the Thunder was incredibly
anticlimactic, but it did get me wondering why
the suits at Ford didn't let SVT build this thing.
The answer to that question
kind of blew everything up.
- In the case of the Thunder part of it
had to do with the fact that it had a limited lifecycle,
and there was going to be a new, a new expedition coming.
And this one was based on the old expedition.
So it was just a matter of timing.
- John told me that if the expedition
had around four years left in its lifespan instead of two
the Thunder might've happened but it was out of his control.
This was not an answer I was expecting.
It seemed too easy, to reasonable.
As my conversation with John went on
I felt my preconceived notions about Ford being challenged.
When I first learned about the Thunder
the gears in my head started turning,
and I started to blame its death on those faceless suits
in management and the fun suckers down in accounting.
We here on Donut have told countless stories
of outlaw engineers, building fun cars that flew
in the face of company leadership.
It's always a great story.
But what I was learning was that it was just that
a story.
I built SVT up in my mind as a scruffy band of outcasts
defying the suits upstairs and building the cars
they wanted on their terms.
But that just wasn't the case.
- And you got to keep mine and in a company like Ford
and this is true for all big companies,
when something like this starts up
you have to have some pretty high level executives
kind of protecting it to the let it grow.
- It turns out that if corporations operated,
how I imagine them to with divisions fighting
and plotting against each other without a common goal,
they wouldn't be very good businesses.
When talking to John he had nothing but good things to say
about his time at SVT. It sounds like
it was a really awesome place to work.
I think the most important thing I've learned
with this video is that sometimes
the truth is boring and that's okay.
The Dyatlov pass incident was just an avalanche.
Those bears had the last name, Berenstain, not Bernstein.
Not everything is explained by some grand conspiracy.
Sometimes things don't pan out because
of factors that are out of your control.
You just got to move on and try your best
on your next project, which is something SVT did a lot.
- The old Thunderbird, the four-seater Thunderbird,
I think we looked at it in around 94, 95, the SVT bird.
The problem there was when we found out
when we were developing it there was only another year left
on the mainstream product and everybody thought, geez.
It doesn't make sense to go ahead and put this in production
for one year when the base product is going away, right?
They were going to stop making the Thunderbird.
Another one that didn't make it was a an Escort coop.
We made a turbo version of that.
Internally it was called the CT 120.
The trouble with that is that we just could never
get it to have the refinement that we would like.
So it ended up in the cemetery.
- Those are just two examples of cars
that SVT couldn't make happen even if there were cool ideas.
Especially, that Thunderbird.
Just a quick side note, SVT actually did build one
of these things and it looks super badass.
But like the expedition, the timing wasn't right.
The important thing is though
the team didn't get discouraged
and let those failures stop them from pushing forward.
Despite the setbacks, SVT was able to keep moving
and produce cars that we still talk about today,
but still after learning so much from John
there is still one question I needed to ask.
Do you know if there are any Thunders left around anywhere?
- No. We only had the one that we built, you know,
I mean anybody can build one.
I mean, it's one of those things all you almost
you've got to do is get all the parts lift
off of the lightning and stick it in an expedition.
- So I can't end this video with footage of us
uncovering the Thunder prototype like I wanted to.
How I planned out in my head,
but Hey, that's out of my hands.
Sometimes things just don't pan out,
and we should build one of these suckers.
A huge thank you to John Coletti
for taking the time out of his day to talk with me
and sharing his experiences and insights from the industry.
I hope you found it as enlightening as I did.
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Tag me in some pics of your lightenings if he got them.
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See you next time.