At the end of the summer of 1957, memorably, the car was launched at an upmarket Cologne restaurant by the singing star Gitta Lind.

Lind's singing style was not one with wide appeal in most of the US or the UK, where she may be chiefly noteworthy as a great niece of Beethoven’s piano teacher.

In addition to the relatively mild "baroque“ insult, Ford's new middle-weight quickly gained other informal names including "Gelsenkirchener Barock“ and "Fliegender Teppich“ (Flying carpet).

Gelsenkirchener Baroque, a term frequently applied to the Taunus P2 in press reviews, was a style more generally associated with heavy furniture in the newly confident German empire during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

The “Flying carpet” soubriquet seems to have been the response of a keen drivers to the company's attempts to give the car the ride and handling characteristics commensurate with its flamboyant bodywork, modelled on the North American boulevard cruisers of the day, set up for a country associated with straighter, wider and more even roads than those commonly encountered in Europe then or indeed now.

The MacPherson strut arrangement would become known for combining good road holding and passenger comfort for a relatively low cost, but the shock settings on the Baroque Taunus nevertheless must have contributed to its informally awarded “Flying carpet” title The P2 came as a two- or four-door saloon.

[2] The Borgward Isabella of the time was never offered with more than two doors, and the two-door Taunus 17Ms of the period seem to have comfortably outsold the four-door versions.

This provided a welcome boost to the company’s domestic market share at a time when its only other mainstream model, the Ford Taunus P1 was lagging badly in the marketplace.

Coming second to General Motors in the high volume market segments in West Germany (which would soon be Europe’s largest national auto-market) became a habit that Ford would find hard to break in the ensuring decades.

Second-hand values for the P2 were never strong, and this combined with inadequate rust protection to ensure that few survived for long enough to acquire "oldtimer status".