The Ford Tempo is one of those awkward points in automotive history. While the Tempo was a just fine, if not disposable vehicle, it generally did not live up to its name. Few would imagine such a machine being the four-wheeled embodiment of setting and keeping pace, as most Tempos have long since lost their tempo and faded into oblivion. Of the Tempos that remain today, the majority of them are beaten down with their best days perhaps decades behind them. Here’s one Tempo that someone managed to keep in perfect shape. There’s a 1990 Ford Tempo out there with all of just 22,923 miles on its odometer and it looks like it rolled out of a dealership yesterday. It’s even more impressive once you find out just where the car is.
The subject of car preservation is an interesting one. There seems to be no shortage of people willing to preserve history’s most famous vehicles. It’s not hard to find someone saving a classic Porsche 911 or most generations of the Chevrolet Corvette. There are museums filled to the brim with the icons.
Regular cars aren’t often afforded the same luxuries of cherished lives. Instead, they’re usually used up, beaten, crashed, and rusted out before being retired to the great junkyard in the sky. Who knows how many models have gone extinct because nobody bothered to save a single example?
It’s sad because while so many of us dream of the unattainable, cars like the Ford Tempo carry people of all stripes millions and millions of miles. Countless snapshots of life’s moments are created in regular cars from the night couples fall in love to learning of big promotions, pregnancies, or just a big personal win. These cars are also there during those dark and rainy days when you just need to cry. Sure, a Ford Tempo may not be historically significant, but even boring cars are worth saving.
Competitive, But Dull
Ford of the late 1970s and early 1980s decided to reinvent itself. As Popular Mechanics wrote, the company entered the then-new decade by downsizing its lineup while also adopting a curvy, futuristic corporate aesthetic. Ford also followed the technology of the times, eschewing classic rear-wheel-drive platforms for new and snazzy front drivers. The Ford Tempo and its Mercury Topaz sibling were designed to replace the old and blocky Ford Fairmont and Mercury Zephyr. My retrospective continues:
Development began in the late 1970s and a focus on the new compacts was on aerodynamics. As Popular Mechanics wrote, in 1978, the Tempo and Topaz were subject to wind tunnel testing. The vehicles spent over 450 hours in the wind tunnel getting their bodies sculpted to cut through the air. As a result, Ford made over 950 design changes to achieve a slippery profile. The finished product had aircraft-inspired doors that wrapped into the roof and featured a windshield and back window angled at 60 degrees.
In the end, Ford’s engineers achieved a drag coefficient of 0.36 for the coupe and 0.37 for the four-door. The coupe’s drag coefficient was equal to the day’s Thunderbird.
Those aren’t that impressive by today’s numbers, but remember, these are inexpensive compacts developed in the late 1970s. Popular Mechanics went on to note that the Tempo and Topaz slipped through the air better than GM’s J-car competition and completely blew Chrysler’s K-cars out of the water. The magazine also saw the Tempo and Topaz sedans going up to bat against imports like the Honda Accord, Mazda 626, Nissan Stanza, and Toyota Corona, while the coupes would go up against the Honda Prelude, Nissan 200SX, and Toyota Celica.
Despite the paragraphs above, the Tempo and Topaz were dynamically about as dull as dishwater. MotorWeek‘s John Davis, a man who usually finds something nice to say about every car, fired off a shot of his own: “[T]hey also have a reputation for performance and styling that are as exciting as watching ice melt.”
In 1988, Ford launched the second generation of these cars, which birthed the gold car you see today. The second-generation cars do look a bit more contemporary, but most Tempos kept the beat slow with 60 mph acceleration times in the mid-12 second range and needed about 19 seconds to complete a quarter mile.
That being said, Ford reportedly did such a good job with the second-generation car’s handling that one tester at MotorWeek likened the cornering performance to that of a Honda Prelude. Granted, I doubt anyone cross-shopped a Tempo with a Prelude. Ford also pumped up the Tempo with the availability of a 3.0-liter Vulcan V6. Sure, the engine was good for all of 130 HP, or 40 more than the lower four, but that was enough to drop the 60 mph acceleration time to 7.8 seconds and the quarter mile to 16.1 seconds. Add in the supposedly good handling and Ford may have created quite the underdog.
But the vast majority of the 1,565,047 Ford Tempos sold between 1988 and 1994 were not spicy at all. Most of them were like the car you see today.
A Look Into The Past
This 1990 Ford Tempo didn’t light the world on fire when it was new. It’s a GL model, which slotted in between the more sporty GLS and the more luxurious LX. In other words, it wasn’t the best Tempo on sale in its day.
Up front sits a 2.3-liter High Swirl Combustion four making a reasonable 98 horsepower and drinking from fuel injection. Ford’s advertised highlights for the GL model were its independent suspension, rack and pinion steering, and standard electronic AM/FM radio. This car appears to have the Preferred Equipment Package 226A, which adds air-conditioning, a tilt steering wheel, a rear window defroster, power locks, and power mirrors, but not power windows. Another option this car has is a three-speed automatic. A standard Tempo GL ran $9,483 ($23,947 today) in 1990, but this one was optioned up to a price of $11,749 ($29,669 today).
After tax and document fees, the original owner drove out of the Reynolds Motor Co. showroom on September 11, 1989, after paying $12,495.75 ($31,555 today). The car had all of 14 miles on its odometer that day and it was built only the month before.
I’ve pulled the car’s history and it gives us only some parts of the puzzle. This car has lived in Illinois for all of its life, staying closer to the Mississippi near the dealership in Moline. The Tempo stayed with its first owner until 2004. Then, the car was sold to a second owner. Unfortunately, Illinois does not require odometer tracking for old cars, so the mileage trail died immediately after the vehicle was first titled.
That second owner held onto the Tempo until 2019, when they sold it to the present owner. Somehow, through all of this time and three recorded owners, nobody ever drove the car further than 22,923 miles. Amusingly, when I pulled a CarFax on this vehicle, the site’s mileage estimator thought this car should have closer to 474,000 miles. The CarFox is certainly ambitious!
Sometimes it’s hard to believe a low mileage claim but that’s not the case here. This car has basically no wear to be found. The pedals don’t show wear from being pounded by shoes for hundreds of thousands of miles. The seats aren’t stained by color transfer from pants or from drink spills. The backseat doesn’t even look like it was ever sat in.
Look at that center console and that steering wheel. You can tell change hasn’t rattled around in the bins and the wheel is unburdened from grubby hands messing it up over three decades of time. The paint is also in remarkable shape, hinting that this vehicle was probably garaged for the vast majority of its life. Even cars in the western portion of Illinois get catastrophic rust and this one just doesn’t have that.
I reached out to the seller for more information. As of publishing time, I did not get anything back.
Perhaps one of the coolest parts about this whole deal is that the seller is being realistic about this car’s value. Yes, it’s perhaps one of the most perfect Tempos you’ll ever see that’s still in private hands. Yet, it’s still a Tempo, so even a perfect one isn’t exactly worth a ton of money. This seller, located in Geneseo, Illinois, wants just $5,000 for it. I think that’s more than reasonable, if not close to “screw it” money for some people.
If you buy this car, I think you have one of two paths. You could drive it and get to experience what it was like to own a new car in 1989. Or, maybe you could continue this car’s path and keep it in time capsule condition. Maybe you could even open up your own museum of mundane cars like the awesome Crazy ’80s Car Museum that I visited earlier this year.
Either way, I’m glad this car exists. I’m happy someone didn’t drive this car. As time goes on, memories fade, and regular cars disappear, preserved examples like this Tempo can bring back a lot of memories. For that alone I think it’s worth the price of admission.
Hat tip to Marcus C!
(Images: RobertSue on Facebook.)
I think time capsule cars like this are great. If you want to preserve what the automotive landscape of this period was like, would it be all F40s and 959s? No. It was these and Ford Tauri (?), and then 100,000s of Explorers and F150 XLTs. No hyper exotics that do get preserved. I do of course understand why that happens.