Junkyard Find: 1979 Ford Thunderbird
Sajeev no doubt wept bitter tears when he saw the near-showroom-condition ’76 Continental Junkyard Find last week, and I’m going to keep those Malaise Era Ford tears flowing with another 1970s luxury FoMoCo product from the same California self-serve yard. This one isn’t quite as nice as the Lincoln, but just check out the metallic-green-and-white two-tone paint job!
I could look up the horsepower numbers on the ’79 Thunderbird‘s 351M engine, but the figures would just make us all depressed. Let’s just say that this car had enough torque to get moving fairly well for its era (i.e., it would get smoked by a 3-cylinder Mirage today).
This can’t possibly be a factory paint job, can it?
Of course it has a landau vinyl roof!
85 MPH speedometer, according to 1979 regulations.
The velour buckets are no longer as luxurious as they once were.
This ad for the similar ’77 Thunderbird shows the 85mph speedo in full effect, plus a very cocaineophile-looking driver. Radio comes as standard equipment!
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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While not 100% the same, it reminds me so much of my mother's 1976 Mercury Montego, although our blue beast had vinyl seats and hand-crank windows. I will say that the rather large bench seat (both front and back) came in rather handy when I started dating...
Had a brand new 78 T-Bird. 351 engine, velour interior and most of the available options. Silver/grey exterior and matching interior with split bench seats. Even the floor mats had white thunderbirds embossed on them. Personally back then I loved the look, as did my peers. It was an aspirational car, considered a 'personal luxury vehicle', combining all the available creature comforts with a big V-8. T-Birds still had a lot of carry over prestige at the time. In its day I would say it was comparable to how a 5 Series BMW is viewed today as far as status/prestige and the type of person who would buy one. Unfortunately the darn thing was a true lemon. Unbelievably bad gas mileage. Bad starter and bad alternator right out of the factory. Each morning when you went to start it one or both of the hideaway headlight flaps would be raised (think that they ran on a vacuum system). Traded a 76 Corvette for it and then traded the T-Bird to get a customized disco style van (another story for later). It might be entitled the stupid things that you do when your young and have more money than brains.