Junkyard Find: 1991 Ford Escort Pony

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Back in the early 1990s, the elite members of the Detroit Big Three were trying hard to compete on price with dirt-cheap imported Misery Boxes such as the Subaru Justy, Hyundai Excel, and Toyota Tercel EZ. They came up with stripper versions of their low-end subcompacts (e.g., the Plymouth Sundance America), which few bought. Why buy an Escort Pony for $7,976 when you could have a zero-option ’91 Civic for $7,095, and still be driving the Civic (very slowly, and maybe on its third head gasket) today? This makes the Escort Pony a very rare Junkyard Find today, so I grabbed my camera when I saw this one at a Denver yard.

Ford used the Pony name on their cut-priced Pintos in the 1970s, and it made sense to recycle it for the Escort.

This one wins the Cryptic Sticker of the Week award.

Remember super-simple climate-control panels like this in cars? Replace the plastic knobs with cheaply plated pot-metal and you’d have the controls from a 1963 Ford truck here.

These 1.9 engines have proven to be fairly reliable in the 24 Hours of LeMons, which is a good indicator of resistance to horrific levels of driver abuse.

The new styling on the ’91 Escort turned Mr. Import into Mr. Escort. Of course, this ad is for the much snazzier Escort GT. If the Escort Pony had TV ads, they were broadcast on high-numbered UHF stations between 2:00 and 5:00 AM.







Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Lemko Lemko on Oct 28, 2015

    My wife had this car's sister - a 1991 Mercury Tracer. Her car was a maroon four-door sedan. Unfortunately, the paint peeled on every top surface and the rubber door sill trim dry-rotted. She replaced the car at 107K miles with a new 2001 Chevrolet Impala.

  • Cprescott Cprescott on Jan 08, 2024

    I still kick myself for not buying this vintage Escort Pony as a two door that ws sitting in the dealer's showroom for over a year that was priced at $6,995 new. I did not repeat that mistake when I bought a 1997 Escort LX that was priced at $7,995 sitting in the same place a year or so later. That car ran trouble free for 180k miles and 22 years before EM parts tarted failing and I wasn't going to put $1500 into a car that wa worth $250. Plus I was tired of it.

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