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From its cotton-candy colors to its tasteful melange of ’50s and ’60s design cues to its Sunday-morning-to-Santa-Cruz driving dynamics, the new 2002 Ford Thunderbird is nearly perfect.

It’s a car that’s made to turn heads and made for people who like a lot of heads turned their way.

What it’s not is a race car. But neither was the original 1955 Thunderbird. “Sporty not sports” is how Ken Gross put it. And Gross, who headed the wonderful Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles for four years and has judged at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance for 14 years, certainly knows his way around classic cars.

No, for those who need a stiff ride and stick shift, there’s a Boxster on sale at your nearest Porsche store.

Instead, the ’02 Thunderbird is perfect for the California couple who weekend in Napa, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs. You’ll find them parked outside wineries, B&Bs and fancy restaurants. You might see them at the country club as the tiny trunk will hold two golf bags. But you won’t see them outside the antique store, unless they collect old spoons instead of old chairs. Although it conjures up a lot of memories, there just isn’t room for much else in this car that goes on sale by late summer.

“The Tbird is really a nice boulevard cruiser,” said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific, an automotive marketing and product consulting firm based in Tustin.

A respected analyst, Peterson loses his unbiased reputation in this case. That’s because he’s No. 1 on the order list for a new Thunderbird at a Southern California Ford dealer.

Last week was his first chance to drive the car, and he came away impressed.

“It has the design aspects that really harken back to the old days of Thunderbird, but it still looks very contemporary,” Peterson said. “It looks like a car that’ll be easy to live with, a car that will get a lot of attention, a lot of eyeball.”

The design is a large part of the appeal of the new Tbird. When a dozen or so were parked outside the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum, the tourists turned away from the surfers and seals and came to see the cars instead.

The front end with its round headlights and egg-crate mesh grille comes from the ’55 original. The portholes on the removable hardtop come from the ’56 model. The rear treatment is pulled from the early ’60s.

Color choices are true to the original car’s spirit of post-war optimism. “We felt color was part of the heritage,” said Mary Ellen Heyde, who serves as Ford’s vehicle line director for the Thunderbird, Mustang and Windstar minivan.

Besides black and white and bright red, pastel shades of blue and yellow are available. Buyers can opt for as much or as little color on the inside as they want. With the full-color package, owners can match a red exterior, for instance, with red seats, a red lower instrument panel, a red steering-wheel top and red shift knob.

Ford is working on getting the paint right for a coral-color version and might even do a bright pink one day.

On the inside, the car is comfortable, with a noticeable lack of squeaks and rattles. Even with the top down and 75 mph on the speedometer, a normal-voice conversation is possible. The interior feels roomy, even for a large or tall person, until the soft-top comes down. Then it starts to feel a little less commodious. Sitting under the hardtop — which weighs 83 pounds and requires two people to install or remove — exacerbates that closed-in feeling. Still, compared with the cabins in cars like the Mazda Miata and the Audi TT, the Thunderbird feels spacious.

On the road, the new Tbird emerges as a fun touring car. Nancy Gioia, the Thunderbird’s chief program engineer, said her team had a goal of “relaxed sportiness” as they dialed in the ride, handling and steering. The target was somewhere between a BMW 330i and a Jaguar XK8. They succeeded.

T e V-8 is nicely tuned with a little rumble as you hit the gas pedal. Most drivers will find acceleration more than adequate, although this fairly heavy car is neither quick nor fast.

Ford sold 1.2 million Tbirds from 1955 to 1997. The car began its life as a classic two-seater before evolving into the nifty four-passenger Square Bird of 1958 to 1960. From 1970 to 1997, Ford made bad decisions about the Thunderbird, allowing its legendary name to be nearly ruined.

Ford executives said they’ll sell 25,000 new Thunderbirds a year. There’s pressure to make and sell more, Heyde said, but that figure is about what it’ll take to keep the Tbird slightly ahead of demand throughout its six-year life-cycle.

Prices start at $35,495. A top-end version with the removable top will have a $38,995 sticker.

The pricing is “pretty reasonable,” said Peterson, the analyst and soon-to-be Thunderbird owner. He expects future, higher-performance versions of the car to cost more.

By one standard, the new Thunderbird is twice as expensive as the original. An Internet cost-of-living calculator says that $2,695 in 1955 dollars — that’s what the original cost — has the same buying power as $17,698.51 today.

Ford won’t say what it spent to develop the new Thunderbird, but Heyde said “positive shareholder value” was a big part of the equation. That’s why the Thunderbird shares 65 percent of its parts with the Lincoln LS and Jaguar S-Type sedans.

What’s different, said Heyde, is “everything you feel and see.”

What’s the same is the car’s platform, although it’s seven inches shorter than the LS sedan with a 107.2-inch wheelbase. The vehicles share a 252-horsepower, 3.9-liter V-8 engine and automatic transmission, too.

Heyde, who is in her mid-50s, remembers asking her father to buy the family a Thunderbird when the original came out in 1955. The new version of the old classic should appeal to baby boomers and, especially, women. She also hopes that “younger, more affluent buyers, maybe people who might have bought some of the foreign brands” will be interested, too.