2017 Ford Fusion Sport first drive: A fitting name

[Suarez™]

Manufacturers love to throw around the word “sport.” They attach it to trim names, package names and special-edition names, but it usually doesn’t mean much. Ford—a company on a roll right now as far as building sporty cars: GT, GT350, RS—just added the word to its midsize Fusion sedan, and God bless ’em, it’s actually sporty. Stick with us here, but when you add 85 hp and 110 lb-ft of torque, albeit with a bigger, turbocharged engine, it’s going to make the car sportier.

The only available powertrain in the 2017 Fusion Sport is a 2.7-liter twin-turbo V6 making 325 hp and 380 lb-ft of torque matched with a new six-speed automatic and all-wheel drive. You may be familiar with that EcoBoost, it’s been known to pull around an F-150 or two. The Fusion Sport comes in at a porky 3,982 pounds, that’s 377 pounds heavier than the Honda Accord, its main rival along with the Toyota Camry. Both of those sedans also offer overpowered V6s, making this a sweet time to get into midsize sedan ownership.

Some of the extra heft comes from the new-for-2017 tech including pre-collision warning, pedestrian detection, park assist ($995), auto emergency braking, adaptive cruise control with stop and go ($1,195), Sync 3 and Android Auto/Apple Carplay. That’s in addition to the returning stuff like lane-departure and blind-spot warnings, lane keeping and the rear-view camera. Ford says that a company’s midsize sedan “is the number one influencer of brand opinion.” This is obviously false, as Autoweek is the number one influencer of brand opinion.

The Sport gets bigger wheels than the rest of the lineup, 19s as opposed to 17s, a dark grille, a sharper front clip and twin dual exhaust. Dark rims with Goodyear Eagle F1 tires are standard, summer Continentals are optional, as is a sunroof. It certainly looks the sport part and it has the numbers to back it up. Could we possibly have an American version of an German autobahn burner?