The Ford Capri is a paradigm of self-deception, but cars are men’s mirrors, and they want to be deceived by them. Thanks to The Professionals (1977-83), in which Bodie and Doyle of Criminal Intelligence drove a silver Capri and a gold Capri, almost two million were sold. Even the police used them, which is absurd. They only had two doors. Even so, I’d like to see a villain stuffed into a fastback coupé, ideally through the window.
I like the old Capri because there was something jaded and stubborn about it: a weary postwar British sex appeal. It was our version of the Ford Mustang, produced from 1969 to 1986. Then we bickered over the obituary because everything is about class: Del Boy of Only Fools and Horses had one too, in the shade of green that usually means clinical infection.
‘Is it,’ the BBC asked with reliable snobbery in The Car’s the Star, ‘a classic car or a sleazy run-around for ageing wide boys?’ Can’t it be both – since it is both?
Though the Capri was replaced by the Ford Probe and the Ford Cougar, whose double entendres I swallow while choking, we moved on to calmer cars: the Escort and the Fiesta. The names were prayers. If we hoped for a fiesta with an escort, we didn’t get one. We got Thatcherism.
But its owners couldn’t forget the Capri, named for the island off Naples, though the old Capri had no ghostly hebephiles: I will leave the question ‘Would the Emperor Tiberius have driven a Capri?’ for another day. (Ferrari and Fiat would say not.) They couldn’t forget how it made them feel because they were 50 years younger then, and their bodies sometimes worked. I met a group of Capri owners last month and I watched their ancient faces reflected in the paintwork. They are furious because Ford reanimated the Capri name in 2024 and attached it to a mid-size electric SUV.
Is it a metaphor? Is it – woke? How could Ford do this to the Capri, they muttered, which means: how could they do this to me? I didn’t want to tell them that pressed steel can’t feel pain; that they have confused the Capri with themselves. The Capri was the best car ever, they said. Except it wasn’t. The new Capri is better. But I am not a man who nearly had a threesome in 1973 and can’t forget.
Sweep away the old Capri, Criminal Intelligence, the Essex V4 engine – made in Dagenham, whose Ford sign was the largest neon object in Europe! – and Doyle’s hair. The new Capri is an SUV, which exists for people who fear being run over, which is every-one. This is a fearful age with a fearful chassis, and people shout their fear with growing size, like birds. Sometimes I think everyone has a mid-size SUV now, like a hundred people singing ‘Memory’ from Cats in a car park.
I like the new Capri, but I like Fords very much: the Mustang is the best sportscar under £60,000 that I have driven, and for that you get immaculate throb. The Capri is boxy with a pleasing face: it is still stylish. There is a jauntiness to it. If it’s a cliché that Americans do optimism better than the British, it is also true: I can’t imagine Mini having the biggest neon sign in Europe.
Forget the throb too: electric cars don’t vibrate. You grip hard and race to 62mph in six seconds while wondering if the car is controlled by China. Then you remind yourself you are in a mid-size SUV, and isn’t this amazing? There is information on the dashboard and screen which is very soothing, as if you have a robot friend. It makes driving feel effortless, which suits me well. It won’t evoke the threesome you nearly had in 1973. I don’t mind that.
There are dozens of mid-size SUVs, but this one made me feel happy, which is what new cars are for. Self-acceptance through the application of money. Men on the estate above Penzance look at it, and note the name Capri, and they don’t seem to hate it. Rather, it incites a curiousness in them as if the name, like any familiar scent, evokes a terrible nostalgia.
Perhaps Ford is right, and those who feel betrayed by the newly sensible Capri will follow their classic cars to the graveyard, and the new Capri will be the famous Capri. It starts at £42,075; its top speed is 111mph; it has a theoretical range of 346 miles, and if it could speak – and one day it will – it would say: I am Mrs de Winter now.
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