When it comes to cars, Argentina has a pretty cool party trick that puts it in a select category of car-building nations: they’re really fond of updating some very old designs long, long past their expected expiration dates. The end results of these somewhat half-assed modernizations are cars that really look like nothing else. Cars that were clearly designed in one long-ago era, but have been dragged, shrieking and flailing, into another era, usually with the help of black plastic and new lighting equipment. The example I want to talk about today is the seventh-generation Argentine Ford Falcon.
There are other examples of this phenomenon, of course, and I’ve even written about them here before.
Remember the Citroën 2CV-sorta-clone called the IES Super America? I once saw one when I was in Argentina, and was positively delighted.
As you can see, the big changes are to lighting equipment, black plastic in the form of a grille and more modern-looking dashboard and instrument cluster. This is really something of a formula, and you can see what I mean when you look at the Argentine Falcon’s 1982 redesign for its seventh generation:
(brochure images from @addict_car and/or Ford of Argentina)
See that? Modern interior fittings, big black plastic grille and black rubber moldings and bumper inserts, along with modern lighting equipment! Slap that stuff on and boom, your 1960s car is now a car of the 1980s!
Just to compare, here’s a 1963 Argentine Falcon:
…and, again, here are the 1982-facelifted ones:
It’s very much the same body, just modified a bit at the ends to allow for the Late Cold War-Era Default Car Face which is this, in case you forgot:
…and the rear was modified to accommodate more modern lights, these coming from a Ford Taunus:
Wheels, as you can see there, were updated as well. Pretty much anything that didn’t require actual sheet metal stamping changes!
The resulting updated Falcon looks, charitably, ridiculous, which I think is why I love it so much. It definitely does feel more modern, but at the same time feels archaic, too, because it’s so clearly something old clumsily trying to masquerade as something new.
The interior I think may be the most successful at the subterfuge, as when you’re inside it, it does mostly feel like a car of the 1980s:
I mean, there’s even a digital clock shoved in there! Just looking at this dash doesn’t necessarily scream 1960s car to me at all. But then, when you get out of the car…
Well, that’s a different story. I love that Ford of Argentina did this, though; there’s a certain amount of hubris and perhaps unearned confidence that it takes to pass off something with such a clearly dated design as something modern. And, even better, the way that was done means that from the perspective of eyes well into the 21st century, we now have a car that looks dated in two separate decades, spaced 20 years apart. It looks dated like and ’80s car and a ’60s car!
That’s a hell of an achievement, if you ask me.
Love this!
Someones gotta start importing these and bringing them to car shows in the states.
Love to see the IES Superamerica up there. The big change in comparison to the regular 2CV came with its predecessor (I believe), the IES 3CV, but can be seen in the image you posted: it’s an actual hatchback! They innovated upon the 2CV formula in a way that Citroën never bothered to. I’m a sucker for long-lasting platforms; I know they’re normally a sub-product of under-development, but the more time passes, the more it seems like it would have been a much more sustainable path for the industry as a whole.
Just to be clear, the 3CV was first built by Citroën Argentina, and resumed production later with IES. But my point was more to do with how the “global” model from the parent company never got such treatment, and it was up for local buiders to innovate within the constraints of an older platform.
Oh, but the Citroën 3CV had a hatchback since 1973.
Yes, absolutely, that’s why I cleared up that the innovation in this case came earlier from Citroën Argentina. But the parent company never bothered to upgrade their own 2CV with a hatch. They had to come up with an entirely new model using the same platform, one that was outlived by the 2CV itself (the Dyane).
I already miss this being called Cold Start. I loved that name.
There’s still a “Cold Start” thingy in the top image.
In beige, it looks like a funhouse mirror W123 Benz. Similar wheels. I bet the doors didn’t have that bank vault thunk, however.
They did, though. It was the only thing that resembled a W123. That, and the fact that they had 4 wheels.
It’s like a weird parallel universe version of the MkIV Cortina..
I don’t know if this is “chutzpah” in the way that selling a Cavalier as a Cimmaron was, it’s more like a clumsy update.
That wagon looks amazing.
Would love to get my hands on the wagon with a manual.
Thanks Torch.
Reminded me of my sister’s first car. A 1961 Falcon 4 door. Bought for $60 bucks.
It was black, so she named it Olive.
It never really ran much, so it mostly sat in the school parking lot.
And served as a place to have a smoke when it was really cold outside.
Thanks for the memories.
For some reason it looks to me like a Chaika. Paint it black and put some burly KGB agents in bad suits inside.
Well, the Soviet and Russian automakers did pretty much the exact same thing – not with Chaikas, neither of those generations were ever facelifted – but with the GAZ plant’s other passenger car line, Volga.
The Volga M24 design was frozen in 1966, but didn’t start series production until 1970, it took inspiration from early to mid 1960s American cars, so wasn’t cutting edge in 1966 and was already dated by 1970, but carried on in production until 2009, with multiple facelifts from the 1980s-2000s that attached increasingly mismatched modern front clips to an obviously 1960s body shell
Of course, Volgas, Chaikas, and Argentine Falcons were all used by the internal secret police of their respective countries, and so did acquire a similarly ominous reputation
You can feature the South American Willys (Kaiser) Jeep wagons next with the weird front ends.
I sent the link to my Argentinian friend, and he replied ‘do I want to hear a story’… of course yes.
The Ford Falcon was a very popular car back in the 60s seventies probably no more after that but The thing is that during the last dictatorship in Argentina from 1974 until 1982 the Ford Falcon in a military green color was the dictator’s favorite car and they would normally use those cars to go around the cities and towns and kidnap revolutionists and leftists and communists and take them back to the secret bases, to interrogate, and even murder them, so yeah the green Ford Falcon in Argentina kind of triggers people…
Sort of correct.
The coup d’ etat took place in 1976 but state terror (mass torture, disappearings) began around ’73 with the return of Peron. Until then, death squads used whatever they could steal, and in some cases, peronist civilians contributed their private cars. After 1976 they centralized illegal repression in the Army and the Navy, hence the olive green Falcons. But there was a fleet of random cars that kept being used for state terror tasks.
We recovered democracy in 1983. That year the Falcon was the best-seller, somehow.
They were raced from 1964 until last year, sort of. Because, of course racecar.
Looks like they were trying to imitate the European Ford Granada and I think they did pretty well for what they had to work with. Mercedes-like, which the Euro Granada competed directly with.
They’re obviously the same car, as Jason points out, but for some reason my brain tags the facelifted one as “looking German” but not the original 60s one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The facelifted one looks vaguely like a 70s-80s Mercedes to my not-that-picky eye.
I think that’s it, especially the brownish one in the top image.
And the wheels. Which look very Mercedes to me.
Looking German was probably intentional
Ford loved doing that stuff, I mean, the US Grenada was an absolutely perfect copy of a Mercedes in every way, and nobody could ever tell the difference between the two
Also: Argentina. I wonder how many actual German Nazis there drove these.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/quiet-alpine-town-argentina-housed-10664788
The Falcon in black or dark green was also the vehicle of choice for the junta’s secret police and death squads. I have to think that put a damper on sales to the general public. Who wants to drive the kids around in something that became a symbol of state-sponsored terror?
It was also a sturdy, reliable car, and was almost unbeatable in motorsports. So there…
Sure. When you’re taking your victims to the place you’ve chosen to murder them, you don’t want an unreliable car. Nobody’s going to stop and give a lift to a terrified victim accompanied by 3 goons with guns.
I would love to add one of these to my weird-car dream-garage. It could sit next to my favorite vehicle to ever come out of Argentina, the Kaiser Carabela. Built from ’58 to ’62, the Carabela was basically a rebadged Manhattan with a slightly beefed up undercarriage. They’re gorgeous cars, and I was just happy to learn they kept being produced somewhere once Kaiser was done here in the states. Would love to see one with the “Nuevo para los 80’s” treatment.
If they took the tail lights from a Taunus, did they also crib a variant of it’s V4 engine, which also happened to be used in Saab Sonnets?
By the ’80s they used 188 (3.0) and 221 (3.6) motors, and briefly a version of the 2.3 Lima, but it gulped gas like the 3.0 and was slower than glaciations.
This looks almost exactly like the GAZ-3102 Volga after its nth facelift in the 80s. And we all know that despite whatever the Russkies said about it being their own development, it was a knockoff of the original Falcon..
This makes one almost want to resto-mod an earlier US Falcon with all the 80s/90s bits, especially inside. I know, it’d likely be easier to bring one north to the States, and be *that* weirdo at a classic car cruise night or show.
An imported 80’s/90’s version would be an excellent troll for Radwood events.
Combines my two favorite decades of cars into one messy package. I’m 100% in.
Was the 1990’s Argentinian Falcon an update of the 1970s Falcon? And so on?
Now I want to go down there and see if they have brand new oval-windowed Tauruses with odd LED running lights and Ford Cync
Sadly, no.
It was an update of the ’63 one. Updated in 1970, 1973, 1978 and 1982, but basically the same car, as Torch mentions.
I like to imagine they revived the 1960’s car to make the 80s one. And that the 70s car was totally different.
In general, if there was ever a car that was mis-named, it’s the Ford Falcon.
Ford Chickenhawk, maybe.
I say, I say, boy, that’s not a chicken, that’s a dog. Boy’s about as sharp as pound of wet liver
And can we talk about those Mercedes-aping wheels? Which just adds another layer of fun, because remember Ford trying to tell us a Granada looked just like a Benz?
They also look a lot like the hubcaps used on various Ford trucks in the 80s. The pictures aren’t clear enough to really tell if they’re alloy wheels or steelies wearing Ford parts-bin hubcaps. Either way, it’s still a nice bit of dressing-up the old design.
And to be fair, Mercedes was known and even respected for continually dressing up some long-running designs into the 80s, too. Come to think of it, a lot of European designs hung around from particularly the late 60s into the 80s, just sporting increasingly modernized trim and interior bits across a decade-and-a-half to two decades. A smattering of new designs appeared through the 70s and 80s, but often they were introduced alongside longer-running models, and themselves went on for relatively long lives.
The frequent wholesale refreshes of most American and then Japanese cars to “stay modern” were outliers compared to Europe and the rest of the world until the 2000s, really. Since then, though, the constant march dictated by evolving safety standards, plus aerodynamics to meet advancing fuel-efficiency requirements has dictated that car model designs won’t hang around for terribly long.
I thought the article was going to be about the chutzpah required to rip off the look of the early 1980s Mercedes 300s so blatantly 🙂
Possibly the same wheels from the Ford Taunus (also sold in Argentina) and the European version of the Ford Granada (which did compete well with Mercedes, unlike the unrelated American Granada).
Same design. The Taunus used 4 lugs, and the Falcon 5 lugs, the same, I believe, as the Granada.
I came here to say this ^
…and in typical Ford fashion, they discontinued it with no successor.
“Because nobody buys them anymore”
Current sales of Ford’s being used to predict business case:
“Ford Focus sales are dead right now, we can’t see it selling”
“All people are buying are SUVs and trucks from us, we can’t justify a car”
“All people are buying are SUVs and trucks from us, we can’t justify a car”
(while no cars but an impractical, overpriced Cars and Coffee curb-magnet are offered)
Forget the JDM imports. I wanna swap a 5.0 and 5 speed into one of these. Maybe with some Mercedes monoblock style wheels.
The V8 should be relatively straightforward. The original Falcon was available with the 260.
Hold my beer… https://www.rodshop.com.au/ford/xp/conversion-kits/
This thing is hilarious. Feed an AI image generator with the following list and the result should be pretty close: Ford Granada, Fiat 124 Spider, GAZ-3102, some Peugeot 604 and a little bit of Ford Falcon.