No good deed goes unpunished. I was recently a bit less than complimentary about the unloved 1990 European Ford Escort Mk5, when filling in some backstory for my recent Damn Good Design about the Escort RS Cosworth. I wasn’t exactly sticking my neck out with a scalding hot take for the sake of internet notoriety; the standard car was widely panned in the automotive press of the time as being a badly steering, wooly handling, cheaply built and cynically executed piece of junk. I remember reading those stories and being distinctly underwhelmed when I saw the thing at its launch at the 1990 Birmingham International Motor Show.
But because the internet loves nothing better than making smartarses like me eat their own words, friends of the site and Weird Car Twitter royalty Sion Hudson and Jim Magill got in touch and offered me a go in Sion’s recently purchased, one owner from new, 62,000 mile 1990 Ford Escort Popular. Having had a later model as his first car, Sion has a bit of an attachment to this shape Escort. He found this one on the UK version of Autotrader, and paid £1200 for it. Car weirdos from the internet. A Mk V Escort. What fresh hell indeed.
If you haven’t read my piece about the Escort RS Cosworth, do so now. Your goth uncle desires fealty. For those who are too pressed for time, here’s a quick recap: In the mid-eighties Ford of Europe was short of funds and resources, thanks to slow initial sales of the Sierra and the drawn-out development of the Mk3 Fiesta.
The 1990 Escort was designed to be as cheap to build as possible, but sold at a higher price to make up for lost profits, despite it being little advance over the car it replaced.
Here’s What Autocar Said
How bad was it? Autocar magazine, which ran a first drive feature against the Escort’s main rivals in it’s 29th August 1990 issue summed it up thusly:
“How can Ford have got it so wrong? The flaws in the new Escort/Orion are so obvious we begin to wonder, naively perhaps, if the engineers and product planners have driven the competition in any serious manner. And even if they have, do the right men in the key positions understand what gives a car the flair, poise and balance that makes it more than just mere transport? Or is Ford so influenced by its accountants and marketing department that their vast budget was only spent in the most visible ways?
These are serious questions to have to ask the world’s second biggest car maker after driving and analyzing its new, and potentially top-selling, models.
You will know by now that in these three twin tests we came away preferring to drive the Ford’s Italian, German and British rivals, even though two of them are about to be replaced by new models.
And that is an appalling indictment.”
That is word for word what they wrote. For this piece I bought copies of the offending issues from eBay, scanned the text and read the article (actual research, never let it be said we don’t give you more for your money here at The Autopian, so cough up). Having now driven the car myself I think Autocar were guilty of the twin crimes of being snobbish and full of finest-grade road tester bullshit. But first grab your Generation X passport and a four-pack of your favorite alcopop because we’re going back to the beginning of the nineties.
This Thing Is So Old
The linear passage of time has been compressed by the advent of online archivism. Today, me driving a car from thirty-three years ago doesn’t have the seismic archeological shock that driving a car thirty-three year old car would have done in 1990. Back in 1957 that would have been the grinding, three-speed side valve Ford Anglia 100E, a 1956 model of which was the car Mother Dearest was driving when I was hatched into an uncaring world. You can take the boy out of east London, but I’m forever stuck in the shadow of the Dagenham plant.
The Anglia was a fancier version of the Popular, back then the cheapest new car in Britain. This is how this bottom-of-the-range Escort got its name. Retailing for a princely £8220 (£19,425 in 2023 money) the Escort Popular is so basic the tailgate is butt naked of any trim designation – hilarious given Ford had this sort of model hierarchy heraldry down to an exact science. Inside there’s more blanks than an episode of Blankety Blank (Match Game for you tea throwers). It’s a car that cruelly laughs at your tightfistedness and mocks you for it. There’s an ashtray but the cigarette lighter is a blank. In front of the ladle for stirring the gearbox there’s storage for cassettes but the standard fit stereo is only an AM/FM radio, the ability to play tapes conspicuous by its absence. Instead of a rev counter you get a car outline graphic with a couple of warning lights. The steel wheels have their modesty hidden by the briefest of center covers.
It Has A Racing Engine. Sort Of
Mechanically it’s thin gruel as well. Pop the hood and you’re greeted by an expanse of empty space in the middle of which sits Ford’s 1.3 liter HCS (High Compression Swirl) engine, which can trace the origins of its design back to – ahem -1959. But – and don’t laugh – this is an engine with competition pedigree. Earlier ‘Kent’ 1.6 liter versions were bolted in the back of Formula Ford racers, and in ‘crossflow’ form powered some of the hotter rear wheel drive Escorts. To update the old nail for nineties emissions standards and unleaded petrol, the HCS bins the crossflow head and bolts on a new one with a lower compression ratio and hardened valve seats. Breathing through a carburetor with the diameter of a cat’s nostril there’s a rippling 60bhp and 75lbs fit at gods knows what engine speed because the only rev counter is an Mk1 eardrum.
The horses are noisy but they are willing. Being someone else’s thirty-three-year-old car I didn’t thrash the bollocks off it, and I wouldn’t have been setting fire to the tarmac if I did – the quoted 0 -60 time is a glacial 15 seconds. There’s not the wriggle-your-toes responsiveness of the old crossflows that was part of what made those old Escorts fun to drive, but it was fine; keeping up with modern traffic in and around town wasn’t an issue.
You access all that road burning power through a four – four! – speed gearbox. Even in 1990 this was fucking stingy, even by Ford standards. I can’t remember the last time I drove something with that few forward speeds. David’s truck maybe? The shift is fingertip easy but approximate in movement. The gears are all in there somewhere but the shift action is tuned for lightness of touch rather than accuracy. Likewise the steering – I’ve steered pedal boats with better responses to helm inputs but the upside to that is it’s light to twiddle when maneuvering, so considering there’s no power assistance that’s probably a fair trade.
With 13” steelies, decent sidewall height and spongiferous seats, the ride quality in this old Escort took me by surprise in the comfortable way it bobbed along. Like the frog being slowly boiled in a pan perhaps we’ve become too accustomed to newer cars turning our spines to paste in the name of sportiness. Ford spent a lot of money (over £1bn) in making the Escort as cheap to build as possible and one of their cost-saving innovations was the way the seats were made – the fabric was vacuumed into a mold and then the foam was injected in and glued directly to it – which is probably why there’s no side separate side cushioning. The car was criticized for a lack of lateral support but come on – it’s a family hatch not a bloody XR3i.
The interior looks modern for the time and the shapes are pleasant. What little stuff there is all works (apart from the radio which needs an unlock code – remember those?) and although the materials don’t really pass what Sion calls ‘the flick test’ the fact it’s all held up well is a testament that Ford did know how to screw a car together. It’s spartan but comfortable, like an old blanket. Being a boggo Popular there’s no adjusting the steering wheel or seat height – I had to sit with my legs splayed, not really becoming someone of my status, but I would never normally be seen dead in the cheap version of anything anyway.
Acceptable Mediocrity
Once you’re recalibrated to the fact you’re driving a car from 1990, you know what? The Escort was absolutely fine. I didn’t recoil in horror at the way it drove, the way it looked or how it felt. It was an exemplar of acceptable mediocrity. Was it really that much worse than its rivals at the time? Let us return to the august pages of the world’s so-called oldest car magazine and their first drive test against the Escort’s key rivals.
First up they compared what was expected to be the volume seller, the 1.4 LX against the Mk2 Vauxhall Astra 1.4 LX. They admit the Escort is roomier, more powerful, faster, has a much better dashboard, and looks more modern than the Astra, which was introduced in 1984. Yet they declared the Astra the winner.
Then they put a more upmarket Escort 1.6i Ghia against a Fiat Tipo. Autocar describes the Fiat as being undergeared, having shitty ventilation, thrown together build quality and poor digital instrumentation. Yet they preferred the Fiat because of its better gearchange and more secure cornering stance. This is pure road tester gobshite. It gets worse. The final comparison pairing was the top-of-the-range Orion Ghia 1.6i against a Golf of unstated trim level. The Golf has heavier steering and a ‘choppy’ ride, less power and they’re basically making up fuel economy figures saying in the text the Golf’s 33 mpg is better than the Orion’s 29. Yet in the specification box the Orion’s consumption figures are better than the Volkswagen’s at all speeds. And buried in the small print is the fact the 1.8 single-point injection Golf is not actually available in the UK. At this point, It just feels like they don’t like the Escort and are moving the goalposts to criticize it.
Ford quickly added a front anti-roll bar to tighten up the front end and in this form Autocar gave the Escort a full road test a few weeks later in their 3rd October 1990 issue. In their summing up of that test, they described the car as being designed for ‘Mr & Mrs Average’. What their snide remarks ignore, is that was Ford’s entire fucking business model, and it had served them well for decades. No Ford had ever been the last word in driving finesse or engineering sophistication, even the sporty ones. They were simply reasonably well built middle-of-the-road cars for people who just needed transport. And this is where I think Autocar were just being elitist snobs. Rather than judging the Escort on what it was, they didn’t like what it represented; the default choice that appealed to working people from all over the UK, not just east London.
The 1990 Escort wasn’t a great car, but it wasn’t categorically an awful one either, and they facelifted it within two years. Could it have launched a year later with better engines? Probably but it would have been more likely two years and Ford couldn’t wait that long. They did the best they could with what they had, an ethos working class people are extremely familiar with. I have a complicated internal relationship with my background and where I’m from, and all the accompanying cultural baggage that surrounds it. The Escort might not have been for me, but it was for my people and despite all my pretentious preening I will always defend that.
Many thanks to Sion and Jim for meeting with me up so I could have a go in the Escort. Sion has a disturbing addiction to poverty spec cars so if you want some more base model brilliance and a closer look at the Escort check out his YouTube channel Morsels and Motors. Jim is father to collection of Fiats including a Panda and Cinquecento. This pair of reprobates drive around Europe on various adventures but mostly just to try out different McDonalds. Their YouTube channel is Also Driven, so give both a like and subscribe. 
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Really surprised to have stumbled across this article, as it mirrors an exercise I carried out last year.
I’d been mulling over the dismal press response to the 1990 Escort – as any totally normal person is wont to do – so decided to reacquaint myself with the exact two copies of Autocar featured in this article.
After reading the Escort articles, I came to the exact same conclusion as the author here. It was obvious the car wasn’t the last word in driving sophistication, but it seemed like the writers had simply made up their minds beforehand. Areas in which the Escort was ahead were downplayed, one suspects in service of being able to stick with the idea for that iconic cover…
I also bought a contemporaneous copy of Auto Express for comparison. While it’s fair to say the testers there weren’t wowed either, one could read the somewhat ambiguous text of the conclusion of the group test they ran as handing the Escort a narrow win.
And of course, just eight years later Ford massively turned it around with Focus and the response couldn’t have been more different, including from Autocar. All’s well that ends well.
Anyway, really interesting article. Thank you.
My dad was telling me the other day that he watched an American police show where the protagonists kept crashing their car and getting a worse one each time, and AFTER they crashed their Yugo, they were given an Escort, much to their chagrin. He then went on to tell me that, at the time, said Escort was the most expensive car you could’ve bought in the Brazilian domestic market. So really, it’s all relative.
I had an 1993 escort wagon and I sort of liked the way it drove,it was nothing fancy though. Also the right rear shock mount broke once,making it even more boat like than you suggested. It was a decent enough car,,but you could feel they made it as cheap as possible.
Autocar had it right. The car was garbage.
Things you might look past when a car is pushing 30+ years old are one thing… except it did that shit from the factory. Nothing sealed. Nothing felt solid. It felt like it was beat hard for 30 years when it was brand new.
Maybe they aged “well” ’cause all the stuff that goes wrong was already wrong?
There was nothing wrong with the one I drove. Alright so there wasn’t much to go wrong but still.
Did you get the one car they made where the wind doesn’t suck the doors away from the seals on the motorway?
Did you miraculously get one that doesn’t leak?
Yes it was a specially fettled car fresh from the 1990 press fleet.
The sight of those very cleanly-designed interior door panels, the grey bumpers with inset chrome against painted bodywork, and the black plastic gearbox lever with molded in shift pattern remind me so much of my first new car – the little ’89 Mercury Tracer.
Which was another car that drove like a mushy bore, but was well built, dead reliable, and had “68 standard features”. (being derived from the Ford Laser/Mazda 323)
I love the opinions of appliance cars as if the Honda drives like a fucking ferrari and the Ford like a covered wagon. The reality is, they both drive fine. One is going to be a little more reliable and logically engineered than the other. But, neither is going to be particularly BETTER at being a motorized vehicle than the other.
It’s like how Mitsubishi gets shit on right now. Half or more of the comments people make about them are not even going to be noticed by 99% of the people. Mitsu just isn’t paying Motor Trend well enough.
There’s a whole misconception that older cars all drive amazingly because of their lack of refinement and analog controls. It is of course complete horseshit.
I owned a K-Reg Orion 1.6LX Orion in the late 90’s and it’s one of the only cars that I regret selling. The main reason I got rid of it was creeping rust and the inability to source an indicator stalk (which also worked the headlights) for less than the whole car was actually worth.
It did look bloody good on the 13-inch XR2 pepperpot alloys that I fitted to it.
Thank you for the memories Adrian!
Actually the only generation of Escort I have owned. Kind of liked the 90ies blobby lines on it. Mine was a diesel estate, absolute shitbox, bought EXTREMELY cheap. Just wanted to try something completely different after driving a brand new high tech VW Lupo 3L for 2 years.
Wasn’t that bad really, remember a nice low rev torque, the soft seats (coming from a new VW..), the non existing need for filling it up very often, and the easy of just sticking a whole spare Citroën 2CV engine and gearbox in the huge luggage compartment.
Somebody smashed the side window on it while I was working late one day, and I gave it away as spare parts to some old guy. Years later some other old guy gave me a motorcycle for free. Yes I do like the idea of karma.
The Mk5 Escort was a god-awful car when it was new and it won’t have gotten any better. Get yourself in something decent from the period (Renault 21 or Vauxhall Cavalier) and you’ll see what I mean.
The rear suspension is argricultural at best and makes the two ends of the car feel entirely disconnected. The ride is awful compared to similar age cars and the fuel consumption is appalling.
They should never have been build and it they all rotted away tomorrow I would not care one iota.
Saying the Cavalier is ‘decent’ is certainly a take.
I have fond memories of the old rwd cavaliers, mainly because, in the early 90s, you could get one that kinda worked for, like, fifty pounds, and drive it til it fell to bits.
(mind you, if you spent a leeetle bit more, you could do the same thing in a Capri, or a mk1 Granada, and feel like you were in the Sweeney. Ah, happy days)
Paid about £350 for my first Capri, a 1.6 Mk3 Cabaret, in 1995.
Oooooh, fancy. A three figure car… 😀
I’ve always liked the finer things in life.
I paid £100 for a VW Polo as my first car (in ’97), but I have to admit the Capri would have been cooler. Mind you, I’d never have afforded the insurance. IIRc it was £200 a year for that Polo, with it’s 1047cc engine.
Your friend’s car is in fantastic shape for its age and cost cutting.
I always felt those had a cute smiling Labrador face compared the the previous generation’s mean squared off tiger face.
The advert is a real treasure of barrel scraping. ‘Constant readout fuel gauge’ as a listed feature?
“Four wheels are included in all trim levels”
“Nicely equipped with seats”
‘Constant readout fuel gauge’. Translation: we saved 50p not wiring it through the ignition switch.
> There’s an ashtray but the cigarette lighter is a blank. In front of the ladle for stirring the gearbox there’s storage for cassettes but the standard fit stereo is only an AM/FM radio, the ability to play tapes conspicuous by its absence. Instead of a rev counter you get a car outline graphic with a couple of warning lights.
That is supreme trolling from Ford. I love it.
The cigarette lighter blank is a work of supreme penny pinching art. The cassette holder it was obviously cheaper to leave in than design a new part for one trim level. But my suspicion is that these super base models were not big sellers and may even have been loss leaders to get people in the showroom.
I’m still giggling about the lighter. Is there a chance the wiring is there behind the blank?
Any other OEM, probably. Nineties Ford? Not a chance.
Please forgive the American Gen X nerdiness, but there is another model I would really love to know more about: the Ford Prefect. A car so commonplace, an alien would just assume it’s a typical Earth denizen.
More than forgiven: I applaud your HGttG reference.
(How in hell did I miss an Adrian article three weeks back??)
Amazing how Ford managed to make the steel wheels with semi-hubcaps look poorer than their old steel wheels with exposed wheel nuts and a little black hat over the axle stub. And I’m getting muscle memories from the odd rubbery feel of the knobs on the audio.
The speakers high in the door trims are another cost saver like the moulded seats. The audio lab at Dunton insisted that you don’t need tweeters if you set a mid-range speaker as near to the user’s ears as possible.
I’m impressed it’s actually a digital tuner.
I had never noticed the creases around the edge of the rear seat cushion before, no doubt the result of the stretchiness/compressibility of the fabric being pushed past its limit by the vac-forming, but it actually looks like an old blanket.