We went everywhere and anything I liked was too expensive as I had a very small budget. I really wanted something like a T-Bird, Regal or Accord. But it was hopeless on my money. We were almost to the point of looking at used cars when I saw a sign from the freeway at a Mercury dealership that said either $9995 or $10,995 I can’t remember which.

So we pulled in and the salesman said he had about 80 Mercury Marquis (Ford LTD II) on the lot and I could have any one on the lot for that price. No high pressure sales pitches or surprise charges added on unlike at the Honda dealership.

So I happily picked out a black one and drove it home that day. It was really a nice comfortable riding car. It looked good from the front and back but the side view was odd. It had 5 windows of various sizes and shapes.

I drove this car for almost 10 years with very few problems. And finally sold it for $300 to a friend. He told me over the holidays that he and his wife had put 300,000 miles on it when it finally died and had bought an Explorer.

Here’s to my future ‘81 Granada coupe with a turbo 5.0, 6-speed, Mustang/Mark VII interior and full Griggs suspension/brake package.

It was a 1988 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe 5-speed. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a hot car. The car came up to the block, and it’s price kept getting lower and lower…finally, someone bid on it at $100. I bid at $200 and that was it. I got it for $200…and $300 in taxes, tags, and auction fees!

I didn’t know how to drive stick. I learned….the clutch only last about 5-10k more miles. When I got it, it had a check engine light. When I put the car in neutral at speed, it would die sometimes…I’d either come to a stop and restart I spent about $150 finding out it was a $28 throttle position sensor. The suspension felt weak and clunked…me being an idiot, I replaced all the struts (macpherson front) and springs. All it needed was an $8 sway bar end link.

I drove the car hard for 28k miles. It was an amazing vehicle. With a $50 boost controller, I could unleash the full 18 PSI as early as 3000 rpms. I didn’t need tread on those rear tires.

I miss that car to this day. I sold it for $750.

In 1988, Ford built a turbocharged, intercooled 2.3 liter fuel injected four cylinder that put out 190 HP and 240 torque with a bulletproof engine, trans, limited slip differential, on 225/60/16 tires, with power everything interior, RWD, and it could get 30-32mpg highway and low 20’s suburban city.

I think those are considered pretty decent specs in today’s terms. The fox body has some beautiful cars thrown in with the crap.

Joe

The Pinto does share the same 4-lug bolt pattern for the wheels, but that’s about it. Maybe they shared steel wheels, but even the Fairmont’s dog dish hubcap was unique for ‘78.

Aside from steel wheels, AM/FM stereos and non-customer facing items like engines, transmissions and power window motors, the Fairmont is damn near a clean sheet redesign.

Off the top of my head, the only other design more clean sheet is the 1986 Taurus. It even had new engines. That doesn’t happen very often at all…

As an aside, I completely spun that car three times on public roads without hitting a single thing. That car taught me the virtues of car control and how to steer a car with the throttle.

Wehn my wife and I first started dating she had a seriously wimpy 84 Mustang. By the time we were married, she had graduated to the 95 Cobra Mustang she still owns (with a 69 Porsche 911T in between). While I make fun of her love of Mustangs, I do love the look and sound of the Cobra. Occasionally, we will be going somewhere in town in our seperate cars, and we feel young and stupid pulling up to a red light. The sound and acceleration of that Cobra are still impressive, even though I know that empirically, they aren’t all that great by today’s standards.

At least among the Mustang crowd, the Fox body Mustangs are becoming very popular due to their relatively light weight, availability of performance parts, and the cost of 60’s Mustangs.

It’s been exactly 20 years since my dad drove home in a brand new, monochromatic red 1988 Mercury Cougar XR-7 with a torquey 302 and beefy Goodyear Gatorback tires. I used to come up with any excuse to borrow that car, and when I did, I was king of the high school parking lot. What great memories!

Look at midsize cars. They have the S60 on the old Volvo platform. The Taurus on a cheapened/updated version of that platform. The S80 on the new Volvo platform. They have the Mondeo on its own platform. The Mazda6 on its own platform. The Fusion on a cheapened/updated version of the 6. Jaguar has the S-type on its own platform, that is a distant relative of the Mustang’s platform. Jaguar’s X-type rides the old Mondeo platform. And of course Aussie Ford has their own unique platform for the Falcon.

If Mulalley can simply get everyone at Ford on the same page platform-wise, he’ll be earning his lofty salary. If he can’t, Ford is toast.

I look back at the platform itself somewhat fondly – it was fairly efficient packaging, lightweight, RWD – GM and Chrysler didn’t have anything like it.

In retrospect, I doubt it could meet anything close to today’s safety standards, though.

This was the car that ended my families relationship with domestic automobiles. Not only was this car absolute junk but the entire ownership experience was a nightmare.

Lesson learned, when there is something wrong with just about every product a company sells DO NOT expect to get proper service because the company is incapable of doing so for over a million customers.

My only experience with a Fox platform car was very negative and sort of funny at the same time.

Around 1998-99, my sister was looking for a cheap used car. I found an '85 Mercury Marquis (not the Grand Marquis) with-supposedly-69,000 miles for only $500. My sister wanted me to check it out. I called up the owner, who went on and on about what a great car it was and that she really didn't want to sell it, etc. My wife and I went to go look at it.

Well, the car was a basketcase! The owner had this big smelly dog and had just tried to wash the dog smell out; the seats were still wet. It still stunk to high heaven, too. Someone had t-boned it at some point, so the driver's door was replaced with a different colored one that was sloppily painted burgundy in an unsuccessful attempt to match the rest of the car…the B-pillar was bent so the door had to be slammed shut!

I drove it and noticed that the engine (3.8 liter V6) was making a lot of clattering noise. Going down the street, the car suddenly changed direction! I jerked the wheel and got the car going straight again, with the steering wheel about 30 degrees off center, when…it happened again in the opposite direction! The front end felt really sloppy and clunked going around corners. The ball joints, and possibly the whole front end, were completely shot.

I brought it to a mechanic that I had made an appointment with to look at it, but I told him not to bother. I didn't need a mechanic to tell me the car was a POS!

Remember the one engine warning light Ford vehicles of that era had (no seperate temperature and oil lights)? On the way back to the owners place, the engine light came on while idling at a stop sign. Great, no oil pressure! I said to my wife, "Geez, let's get this thing back ASAP. I don't want the engine to go before we get there!" I told the owner, "Sorry, not interested. Bye!" and we quickly left.

That car either had 169,000 very hard miles or 69,000 very, very hard miles on it. That wasn't the last I saw of it, though. A short time later it turned up at a shop around the corner from my father-in-law's place, where it sat for a while, and then went away for good. The engine probably died.

I called up my sister and told her I had good news and bad news: Bad news, the car's a POS. Good news, you're not buying it and didn't have to suffer checking it out! Man, that was an awful car!

The four speed was missing a true fourth gear. one two was very quick, three was a bit high, and fourth was an way-Overdrive. The key was to rev the tar out of the thing and get the car to overboost, with a buzzer mounted somewhere in the dashboard. You had to redline it to get a shot at being near any torque or boost for the third and fourth gears.

It hated hot weather and idling, a real problem in NYC traffic. The TRX tires were good for the time, and the suspension, for 1979, was OK until the car got loose. The carb was the problem, as the intake tract was “wet”, unlike today’s turbos, or my Callaway. Gas would pool, and you were done. There was no intercooler, of course, but the idea of running fuel/air through the plumbing was the true difficulty. I’m sure that the “draw through” design was a lot easier than trying to pressurize the carb, but plain and simple, it didn’t work.

When it ran well, you only wished someone had sprung for the five speed, or at least properly speced the ratios in the four speed.

We were glad to see it go back into lease land. This was another example of “I will never buy an American Car”, converting lifelong US car buyers, my parents.

A few years later, I had a decent highway run with an SVO Mustang, and was impressed highly, wondering how the same company could greenlight for production such a turd as was the ‘79

My favorite Fox platform memory: rounding up cattle in my grandmother’s ‘85 Crown Vic in a Texas pasture (including a chase across a dried up pond). Now that’s fun.

Hank, if you mean the full-size Crown Vic/Grand Marquis/Town Cars you’re thinking of the Panther platform, which came out about the same time as the Fox platform in 1979, and is still alive, but barely kicking.

jthorner & stevenlang,
I plan to do a story about Ford’s “Camelot” era, focusing on Peterson’s enormous contribution in saving Ford from its near-death in 1980.

Trotman was more of a champion of internal growth and understood that Ford’s management had to be streamlined for it to remain competitive. He also managed to keep very good relations with the suppliers and dealers. Two very important items that his successor never fully valued.

What a great job for an 18 year old car loving kid that was!

You can see a photo of one here:

http://rides.webshots.com/photo/1309417627067709611qkMFnt

Donald Petersen deserves a lot of credit for what he did for Ford in his days there. The Fox platform was his baby, and he also realized that something completely new was needed to get Ford back into the game in the 80s when they were once again falling off the cliff. He pushed the Taurus out and made history with that car. Ford hasn’t had a really great President since he left.

The real key aspect of top management is making decisions, and the consequences of those decisions can sometimes go on forever. Ford’s buying binge during the Nasser years was clearly a big mistake in retrospect. Imagine if the CEO of Ford at the time had focused all the resources of the company on making the best products for the brand portfolio it already had instead of squandering money and people resources on Jaguar, Land Rover, the Mazda turn around, a line of junk yards in England! and Volvo. Imagine what they could have done by sticking all that energy into the brands they already had.