See that thing just below the rear window? That’s the fourth-gen Thunderbird’s greatest yet most under-appreciated feature: The fart vent.
The way this brilliant system works is that there’s a vent in the front of the car that lets air into the cabin and a vent just below the rear window that lets air out of the cabin, with a switch on the center console to electrically open or close both vents.
In Thunderbird literature, this is advertised as a way to filter “stale air” from the cabin. But we all know that they really mean farts. This system is there so that if somebody passes prodigious gas in the car but you don’t want to roll the windows down, you can simply flick the fart-be-gone switch (as I like to call it), and that so-called “stale air” will be gently whisked away by a steady stream of Earth’s atmosphere.
Surely, this is among the greatest achievements in all of automotive history. The fart vent is a simple but brilliant device, and nothing says luxury like revoking your passengers’ ability to affect what smells enter your precious nostrils. None need be concerned with who delt it, for none shall have smelt it! Just try to make me sniff a fart in my Thunderbird, you can’t! BWAHAHAHAHA!
The only flaw with this otherwise fabulous feature, at least in my experience, is that with age the electronics tend to... not be electronic anymore. By which I mean my Thunderbird’s fart vent is now stuck open. But it’s all good, it provides a nice breeze anyway. And it’s only mildly inconvenient in the winter, when the heater takes a while to warm up and in the meantime it... gets........ soooo cold.
But that’s a small price to pay for the decimation of farts, right?