Hey! Didn’t we just talk about Lincoln vehicles? Now we’re talking about Lincoln’s parent company, Ford.

That’s just the random nature of the order of these articles.

Anyway, while we previously looked at LincolnVehicles.com, today we’re focusing on parent company Ford, which used the very similar FordVehicles.com.

This URL was in use it lots of ads back in the day (the ads I have showing FordVehicles.com range from 1999 to 2007). Here’s a clean example from an April 1999 magazine:

That dude looks pretty chill for someone with so many hobbies. His dog, on the other hand, doesn’t look too impressed.

That’s okay, pooch, because what we care about is in the fine print near the bottom of the ad where we have this URL:

As I mentioned before, this URL was in tons of old ads. So where does FordVehicles.com go today?

That’s not bad. Now, the screengrab above is from June of 2020 (this article is being written and published in February 2021) so the screengrab is a little outdated. However, you can see that FordVehicles.com now redirects to simply Ford.com.

We’ve covered this question before about whether it’s appropriate to link to a simple domain that covers a brand that has many divisions (like Ford has Lincoln and Ford vehicles, not to mention Ford corporate information, investor relations and racing efforts). In this case, if you’re looking for information about Ford vehicles, you are now directed to simply Ford.com, which is a perfectly acceptable choice.

I’m just glad to see that FordVehicles.com has not been neglected over the years and is still serving a somewhat useful purpose.

I have five other ad examples (well, actually more, but, spoilers!) that feature FordVehicles.com as the website. Here’s a four-page spread from February 2006:

While the bottom corner of the last page features the familiar URL of FordVehicles.com, there’s something slightly more interesting at the bottom of the third page of the ad:

Not only does this ad mention the FordVehicles.com domain, it goes a step further and tacks on the /Fusion site section.

While, yes, 2020 was the last model year for the Fusion, there are still a number of brand-new 2020 model Fusions available if you want one. And, at least right now in February 2021, Ford still has a page dedicated to the Fusion on their website.

So what happened to FordVehicles.com/Fusion?

If that looks familiar, it should. It’s the same Ford.com site we saw just a moment ago. Even though we tried to go to the /Fusion site section, the site simply redirects to Ford.com.

That’s a little disappointing as there is an active site on Ford.com for the Fusion. However, it’s also not surprising. The primary domain of FordVehicles.com redirects to Ford.com and it looks like that redirect doesn’t care about site sections. It’s unfortunate, but it could be worse.

I mentioned that I have more site section ads that featured FordVehicles.com and I’ll present those now. However, I won’t string you along for each one since they all do exactly what the /Fusion site section did above — they all redirect to simply Ford.com.

In the interest of completeness, however, here are the rest of the ads that I think fall into this grouping:

This one shows the Ford Edge precariously balancing on the edge of a wall (get it? Edge on the edge? Nevermind). The bottom right corner of this ad gives us FordVehciles.com/Edge:

Then, here’s an ad for the Escape Hybrid (when was the last time you actually saw one of these on the road??):

And the ad wants us to go to FordVehicles.com/EscapeHybrid:

There’s also this ad for the Expedition:

And the ad has this URL in the lower left-hand corner:

It may be interesting (or maybe not) that this Expedition ad also had this little mail-in card you could send off for more information:

In the vertical text on the left-hand side, we see the same reference to FordVehicles.com/Expedition:

And the last ad in this set is a three-page spread for the Explorer:

Tucked into the faint text in the lower right-hand corner of the ad is this bit:

As with all of these FordVehicles.com URLS featured in these ads, FordVehicles.com/Explorer goes here today:

With so many site sections promoted over the years, it’s a little disappointing that they don’t properly redirect to current site sections (even though we know they exist).

That said, this could be much, much worse. So at least someone at Ford is trying. And for that, I applaud them.