There seems to have been some discussion of keeping the Contour SVT only when the rest of the line went out of production, but that is all it was, discussion.
One of the biggest problems with the Contour was that it was designed in Europe so the Detroit people took a very nasty "not invented here" attitude about the car. This attitude flowed down (not trickled, but flooded) to all levels. The car never had a chance.
The attitude that no one wants a Contour if you can get a more poorly equipped Taurus or even Crown Victoria for the same money was also do to no effort to market the Contour for what it was. It was not just a Tempo replacement.
Part of why the Taurus was never an alternative was that it lost it's image of high performance with the failure of the last SHO. A manual trans option would have kept it alive with the earlier SHO enthusiasts. Instead of fixing the problems with the SHO, they simply chose to stop supplying a car in that segment. Also the Taurus could never be made to handle as well as the Contour.
And Ford wonders why they are loosing market share. It is not so much that they have lost it as it is that they abandoned it.
