Ford Mustang Cobra II

The Ophidiary refuses to sneer at this car, and asks you to hear it out.

By 1976 emissions law, insurance actuaries and two oil shocks had between them removed the ability of any American manufacturer to sell horsepower. What remained was iconography. The Cobra II was white with blue stripes, wore a snake on the front wing, had a non-functional scoop and a spoiler that spoiled nothing, and produced less power than a modern hot hatchback extracts from four cylinders and a turbo.

It also became, via a television programme about three detectives, one of the most recognisable cars of the decade — a white-and-blue Cobra II driven weekly into the living rooms of an entire generation, most of whom did not know or care what was under the bonnet.

And here is the point. It worked. Not as a car — as a car it was slow and it handled like a filing cabinet — but as a name. The snake did its job. In a decade that had confiscated performance, Ford discovered that you could sell the promise of venom in vinyl, and that people would buy it, and that some of those people would grow up to buy a Terminator Cobra in 2003 because of what a sticker had told them in 1977.

Mimicry is not a failure of nature. The scarlet kingsnake is harmless and survives by wearing the coral snake’s colours. It is not lying. It is participating in a signalling system that predates it. The Cobra II is a Batesian mimic and the Ophidiary honours it as such.