And so, once again, we have a brand-new definition of "cool." Actually, two new definitions -- and rather contradictory ones at that.

At the North American Auto Show in Detroit, the Ford Motor Company has just declared 2004 "The Year of the Car."

What will bring this about, says Ford, is the return of the "muscle car" -- Ford is bringing out a new, pumped-up Mustang, while General Motors revamps its old Corvette.

They will be, Detroit promises, the very definition of "cool."

Forgetting for the moment that no one has ever seen a man with a full head of hair driving a 'Vette, let us turn to the other new definition of "cool."

It comes from Japan, Detroit's arch enemy.

While Detroit manufacturers chase after the increasingly Japanese car market by renovating muscle cars and producing more fuel-efficient compacts such as Chevrolet's new Cobalt, the Japanese have decided, in an astonishing reversal of roles, to go after the traditional American market for pickup trucks.

Toyota is bringing out a beefed-up version of its Tundra, and Nissan will offer the Titan, both intended to compete with such popular good-ol'-boy gas-guzzlers as the Ford F-150, the Dodge Ram and the GM Silverado.

Honda, however, is planning to go that extra step and launch something called the Sport Truck Concept -- a blend of a sports utility vehicle and pickup that they're calling a SUT ("sports utility truck") and aiming directly at a market share Honda has identified as "the cool dad."

This, of course, is not aimed at all at the cool dad, but at the cool dad's children.

Detroit may have discovered some years back that women cast the deciding vote in a vast number of family vehicle purchases, but Japan is, once again, moving ahead of the pack in determining that the new powers behind vehicle purchases are the ones that sit in the back seat, not the front.

Just ask any parent of teenage children who might be thinking of buying yet another minivan.

You want to be a "cool dad" to your children, you do what they tell you to do.

But it doesn't really matter what marketing scheme we're talking about or even what country -- the aim is always the same: to identify The Car of the Future, and cash in.

We have all seen this commercial before, in whatever form it takes.

Detroit is in some panic over a continuing downturn in North American automobile sales.

Foreign car sales now take up 40 per cent of the U.S. market, double what it was a generation back.

Detroit vehicles have improved, but cheap financing hasn't worked, incentives haven't worked and so now we have 40 new or refurbished models on display at the annual auto show.

GM is so concerned about dwindling interest that it has announced "the largest vehicle giveaway in history" -- 1,000 free cars to anyone dropping in on a dealership during January and February and lucky enough to push the right "hot button."

Panic was much greater back in 1980 when the oil crisis and the Japanese invasion had muscle-car Detroit reeling to the point where "The Car of the Future" was all anyone could talk about.

Think tanks were predicting the arrival of the so-called "world car" -- one small, fuel-efficient car for all countries, with interchangeable parts -- and the Canadian and U.S. governments were considering a complicated bailout of struggling Chrysler.

The Car of the Future, Chrysler head Lee Iacocca announced that year, would be the K car.

And just to prove that it was the ultimate in "cool," he arranged for his pal Frank Sinatra to be handed the keys to the first shiny new model that rolled off the assembly line.

Cool, unfortunately, doesn't have nearly as much of a shelf life in automobiles as it does in music, as the K car almost immediately proved.

Still, it was not the first Car of the Future and certainly will not be the last.

Canada knows this better than most, having given the world the Bricklin, the gull-winged futuristic sports car out of New Brunswick that was once the future and almost immediately the past -- despite being the ultimate in "cool."

In 1912, the Jules "30," manufactured in Guelph, Ont., appeared to be on the road to tomorrow when its builder introduced a horn button that was mounted in the middle of the brake pedal.

The intention wasn't to be "cool," but to scare chickens off the road.

And way back in Confederation days, Canada was momentarily the ultimate in "cool" when Henry Seth Taylor began lumbering about the mud roads of Quebec's Eastern Townships in a steam-propelled vehicle that had everything going for it but some mechanism that could stop it.

When you think about it, though, Taylor might well have invented the original Car of the Future.

The automobile industry, after all, has never bothered applying the brakes since.