Engineering and designing a car is really, really, really expensive. No, seriously, it costs so much that some companies, like Ford with the initial Taurus, have risked the their entire future on the success of a single model. That’s why so many car companies partner with rivals just to be able to get a cool ride to market without breaking the bank. Cross-marque cross breeding didn’t start with the Scion BRZ and Subaru FRS, even though it’s so weird to see two pretty much identical cars sold at these disparate brand’s dealers. Looking back to Ford, there was the time that they jumped in bed with Nissan and birthed a minivan baby. The resultant Mercury Villager and Nissan Quest saw their debut delayed because one marque liked pictograms on their HVAC controls while the other favored words. Less filling! Tastes great! It’s stuff like that which makes you wonder why companies don’t just go it alone. Then you see the financials on what it takes to design something like a firewall and you then wonder how any single company can make any money in this day and age. Look, it’s a given that car companies are going to hook up like college kids on a Friday inight, but the question I want to send you into the weekend with this week is which two companies really should be doing the romance thing? What companies -whether presently connected or not – should really see how things pan out when they activate their own untapped wonder-twin powers? Image: ft86club