Junkyard Find: 1981 Ford Granada L, Beige Fox-Body Edition
Published: January 3rd, 2017
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The first-generation Ford Granada was based on the aging platform that debuted with the 1960 Falcon, and we have seen this ’77, this ’79, and this ’79 so far in the Junkyard Find series. For the 1981 model year, the Granada moved to the Fox Platform, and very few were sold for the two short years of the Fox Granada.Here’s a rare ’81 sedan that I found recently in a Denver-area self-service wrecking yard.
L was the base trim level in 1981, and the MSRP on a four-door L sedan was $6,633. That’s about $17,500 in inflation-adjusted 2016 dollars, so this car was very affordable.
The real cheapskates opted for the “Pinto” 2300 four-cylinder engine, but this car has the optional 200-cubic-inch straight-six, good for 88 horsepower. Fortunately, this car weighed only 2,750 pounds, or a bit less than a 2017 Honda Civic. It was slow, but not quite as slow as the depressing power numbers might suggest.
How about a nice pink-and-beige interior, made from the finest velour and vinyl (that was available for cheap in Michigan)?
Sometimes it’s hard to say why a particular car ended up in a place like this. Not this time!
It’s completely rust-free, as one would expect from a car sold in bone-dry New Mexico and driven in nearly-as-bone-dry Colorado. It would have been sleeperific fun (and easy) to take this car and apply all the standard go-fast tricks used by the Fox Mustang guys, as just about all the mechanical stuff interchanges between the various Foxes.
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38 different inspectors examine every … single … car. Note the 1958-style theme music in this ad.
This dealership promotional video shows you everything you need to know about the Fox Granada.
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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The ads were right on about the quality. I wonder how much more it cost to drive home in one of these as compared to a K car of the day? Notice how it was still running probably 30 years later? It lasted 3x as long as an Aries/Reliant would have.
This was one of the earliest cars I can remember seeing on the road. These were relatively common in Buffalo NY, in fact there was one driving around the Southern part of the city as late as 2011. My grandpa had a white early 1980s Fairmont, he held onto it until about 1996.