Ford Fairlane 500 Cobra

This is the purest expression of the American budget-performance idea: put the largest available engine in the least expensive available body and let the customer negotiate with the consequences.

The Fairlane Cobra had a bench seat, a column shift if you were unlucky, rubber flooring, and 428 cubic inches of Cobra Jet. There was no attempt to make it handsome. There was very little attempt to make it stop.

What makes it worth a page in this Ophidiary is the class inversion. The Cobra name had been established on a hand-built aluminium roadster costing more than a house. Six years later it was available on a stripped-out Ford saloon aimed at a twenty-two-year-old with a factory job. The serpent had, in the space of half a decade, gone from aristocracy to street level — a trajectory no other automotive animal name has managed.

Snakes are not status animals. They live in walls and under sheds and in the long grass at the edges of car parks, and they are entirely indifferent to whether the property is expensive. The Fairlane Cobra understood this instinctively.