The seventh generation of the Ford Thunderbird is a personal luxury car that was built by Ford from the 1977 to the 1979 model years. In a key marketing shift for the model range, Ford repackaged the Thunderbird from a full-size car to an intermediate car, and ceded its full-size luxury coupe status to the Ford LTD Landau coupe. Rather than being the traditional Ford counterpart of the Continental Mark V, the Thunderbird would share the chassis with the Mercury Cougar and the Ford LTD II before the Ford Fox platform version was introduced for 1980.
The squarer, sharper styling was popular, as this generation became the best selling in the history of the Ford Thunderbird. Helped by a US$2,700 drop in price from 1976, over 318,000 were sold in 1977 and 352,000 in 1978 (the best single sales year in Thunderbird history), followed by 295,000 in 1979. The styling of its unique wrapover roofline would carry over in smaller versions of Ford automobiles such as the 1978–1983 Ford Fairmont Futura and the Mercury Zephyr Z-7 coupes which were originally designed as Fairmont-based downsized Thunderbird proposals.[2]