Ford Escort 1981
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Ford Escort 1981
Published June 30, 2021 7:17am EDT
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A vintage Ford Escort car gifted by Prince Charles to Princess Diana as an engagement present - has sold for $65,000 at auction.
The 1981 Ford Escort Ghia Saloon was given to the late Princess of Wales by her husband-to-be in May 1981, two months before the Royal Wedding.
Princess Diana's 1981 Ford Escort had 83,000 miles on it at the time of the auction.
(SWNS)
The 40-year-old car disappeared from public view for over 20 years - having been privately owned by a big fan of Princess Diana's, who kept the car's Royal history a secret even from her friends.
But Tuesday, the vehicle appeared as part of the Royal Auction at Reeman Dansie auction house in Colchester, Essex.
And it exceeded its guide price of $40,000 to $55000, when one lucky bidder snapped it up early in the day for $65,000.
The vehicle remains in amazingly original condition, with its original paint and upholstery, and 83,000 miles on the clock.
The clean, silver car even bears the same registration plate it had when Diana was driving it - WEV 297W.
Diana Driving her car to a school visit with police bodyguard Graham Smith.
(Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)
The Ford was Princess Diana’s personal transport in the early part of her relationship with the Prince of Wales.
She was often seen driving it, and even watched the Prince playing polo whilst sat inside the car.
It comes complete with a silver frog mascot on the bonnet - a copy of a gift from Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah Spencer, to remind her of the fairytale of a girl whose kiss turns a frog into a prince.
James Grinter, the Managing Director of Reeman Dansie, previously said he was "amazed" by the originality of the car.
He said this will be important to collectors who put a high value on owning something that was a personal possession of the late Princess.
One of Princess Diana’s other iconic cars, her Audi convertible, sold last year for $80,000.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2022 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Legal Statement . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .
More photos of Ford Escort Ford Escort Problems Problem with a start. 1996, This car stay for 1 year without starting. Now we want to use it bt it not want to start... Engine probem 1995, It started shuddering the engine then it would stop for a coupla months then this past 2... Wiring on battery 2003, not getting power to fuel pump which is causing it not to start,someone had stole the ba...
The Escort is offered as a two-door coupe, four-door sedan, and a four-door wagon. It's powered by a 2.0-liter, 110-hp SOHC 4 cylinder(130-hp DOHC version available) and a 5-speed manual or a 4-speed automatic. ABS is optional.
The Ford Escort is a compact car that was manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The North American Escort adopted both the badge and the general design of a redesigned European model, and the name has been applied to several different designs in North America since its introduction as Ford's first successful world car. The Escort was Ford's first front-wheel-drive car built in North America.
The Ford Escort was based on the Mazda B-platform since 1991. It replaced the dated Ford Pinto subcompact car (1971-80) with a modern front-wheel drive design popularized by the successful introduction of the Volkswagen Rabbit. It also effectively replaced the smaller Ford Fiesta, which was imported from Europe from 1978-80. Though mechanically sophisticated, the Fiesta was too small, even for a Pinto replacement.
The Escort was one of Ford's most successful models in the 1980s, earning a much better reputation than the Pinto, which faced widely-publicized safety issues. In fact, the Escort was the single best-selling car in its second year in the United States and during most of that decade.
Introduced in 1981, the first American Escort was intended to share common components with the European Mk III (as with its sister, the Mercury Lynx), and was launched as a 2-door hatchback and as a 4-door station wagon, with the 4-door hatchback following a year later. It had considerably more chrome than the model sold elsewhere. The car was freshened in 1983.
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( first posted 12/29/2011 ) I really wanted to like the Escort when it arrived in 1981. Just like I really wanted to like Ford then. Ford was just coming out of its dark night of near-bankruptcy, having been taken down by one too-many of their notorious 1970s bulge-mobiles. Their new president, Donald Petersen, was my kind of guy: no BS, soft-spoken, and a genuine car guy. And he had some serious cleaning up to do after a decade of Lido and Hank’s self indulgent ways. The all-new fwd Escort sounded so promising: a clean sheet design, a genuine VW Golf/Rabbit competitor, a world car, no less. Then I drove one, for two weeks. And I’ve been hating on this generation of Escorts ever since. First impressions are lasting ones indeed.
Ford made a lot of hoopla about the new Escort being a World Car, a mostly new concept at the time for one of the Big Three. Not totally, of course, as GM’s Chevette was an Americanized Opel Kadett. But this was different, a new car designed from scratch to be built globally by Ford and its affiliates. Of course, GM was doing the same thing with its J-Car program, which arrived just one year later.
The problem with the Escort was the classic one of too many chefs engineering departments spoiling the stew. Ford had never really tried this before, and the (once) all-mighty hometown team probably had some issues sharing responsibilities, or at least coordinating them. Who knows how it all went down, but the end result was…
…that red 1981 Escort hatchback waiting for us at the Hertz lot in Denver. By that time, I had read a few things about the new Escort in the magazines, but frankly, nobody wanted to be too terribly harsh with it, being that Ford’s future existence (and advertising budgets) were practically riding on its knock-kneed stance.
Yes, the new Escorts had a peculiar tendency to exhibit positive camber on the front wheels, and negative camber on the rears, as in this white coupe, which is serial number 1. That might not necessarily be the end of the world, but in the case of the Escort, it was an all-too effective tell-tale of its road manners: confused, bungling, idiotic.
We were on a two-week vacation in the Rockies, staying in some friends’ rustic cabin right up near the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park. I figured the Escort would not only be cheap, but fun to drive on all the endless mountain roads in that part of the world, a driving paradise. Especially so in the fall, when all the tourists were gone.
I figured wrong; the Escort was ill-suited to the task. And it wasn’t just the very unsorted-out suspension, which made it feel like it was sick, staggering around corners and bobbing on the straights. And that was before we ever left the airport!
Time to get on the highway, and the Escort’s other infirmities quickly made themselves known. Our rental had a stick shift, as I had requested, wanting to make the most of its obviously none-too powerful 1.6 L CVH four. What was Ford’s idea of a stick shift? A super-wide spread four speed, making it essentially a three-speed with an overdrive. Just the ticket for those impressive EPA numbers for the ads. But the worst possible gearing for a 69 hp engine in the high altitude Rockies. EPA-hyping is an old trick, and in this case a hellish one.
Especially since the CVH motor was a gutless lump, which made horrendous noises as it slowly crawled its way up into the rev band. No wonder its acronym became to stand for C onsiderable V ibration and H arshness. The drive up Hwy 36 to Boulder that night was a major letdown, and an ugly foreshadowing of things to come. The coffee-grinder under the hood couldn’t handle it all in third gear, and second was too low. The spread between the gears was ridiculous, essentially a six-speed with second and fourth gear missing. A seven speed with second, fourth and sixth missing? You get the picture.
I knew this road like the back of my hand, and used to be able to rip up it in my big-bore 1350cc VW Beetle flat out in fourth. Maybe if I trusted the Escort’s handling better, which felt like it was walking on stilts, I might have been able to take the curves flat out in third too. Not tonight, in this car.
Turns out that Ford just barely killed a 1.3 liter version shortly before going into production. Now that would have really made an impression. Good call. Meanwhile, the Euro 1.9 liter Escort Mk III was making 90 hp at a minimum, and more in the higher output versions.
It’s not like the Escort kept us from having a good time – hiking, that is. We drove it all over Central Colorado, and it was an endless exercise in frustration. And Ford was taking on the brilliant, fuel-injected and superb-handling Rabbit/Golf with this? Good luck.
Well, in a way, Ford did luck out. Timing is everything, and the Escort arrived at exactly the second moment in time when Americans were freaked out about rapidly rising gas prices. Folks were practically giving away Grand Torinos, Elites, and such stuff in order to stuff themselves into an economical Escort. And it said Ford on it; nothing exotic or foreign for these folks! The Escort sold like warm corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair.
Like my mother: she dumped her ’73 Coronet wagon and bought an Escort wagon in 1981 or 1982. Well, the Coronet was bigger than she needed, now that most of the kids were gone. And of course, it had to be an automatic. So on my next trip home, I had the joy of trying it out. I can’t quite decide which was worse; that wide ratio stick or the automatic.
The early (1981 – 1985) FLC ATX was a torque-split automatic, meaning that a percentage of the engine torque bypassed the torque converter, in the pursuit of that ever-important EPA number. It felt very much like an old original Hydramatic: quite mechanical, with rather abrupt shifts, and lots of gear whine. The new World Car? I hadn’t expected that. By 1986, fully-hydraulic slush-boxes were back. But by then I was long gone.
OK, I was spoiled by all the that damn furrin’ machinery I was driving or exposed to in California at the time. Which means that as Ford slowly fixed all of the most egregious issues of the early Escorts, I had long lost interest in it. And even though Ford did consistently improve it, let’s face it, the Japanese competition was a very fast moving target during the eighties, as the 1984 Civic makes all-too painfully clear. This generation Escort was perpetually playing catch-up.
In 1983, the GT came along, which is essentially what the Escort should have been all along: genuine fuel injection, which added 20 hp to the paltry base engine. And a five speed, I assume. And a sorted-out suspension, I sincerely hope. I can only speculate, because I never got in one again. Which I possibly regret now, as some folks speak fondly of them. Did the engine speak fondly yet too? Not from what I hear.
That might have been more the case in 1985, when the Turbo GT appeared. Turbos have a knack for making certain rough engines sound smoother, and that’s what this one did. With 120 hp, it was undoubtedly brisk for the times. And apparently, it’s very easy to squeeze out twice that much, as the basic CVH engine is quite tough, when it’s not spitting out valve seats or blowing head gaskets, anyway.
The Escort kept morphing, seemingly year by year. Like a new rear roofline on this one,
The interior followed a similar line of evolution, from cheap red vinyl to cheap corporate gray Ford mouse fur.
My younger brother bought a Pony version of one of the latter years as his first car, and was quite happy indeed. It was a reliable, cheap and economical set of wheels. I’m sure there’s many others out there with happy gen1 Escort memories. Not me; I was robbed of them by my first impression. I did give Ford a pass, by buying a ’83 T-Bird TC just a couple of years later. They were trying harder by then, although my Bird was hardly a highly-refined vehicle.
Exactly ten years after my first Escort outing in the Rockies, my parents threw a family reunion in the Rockies. My rental was another dud, a (Daewoo) Pontiac LeMans. But theirs was a brand-new first-year 1991 gen2 (Mazda 323 based) Escort. I drove it a few times, and that certainly left a mighty fine first impression. There are second chances in life after all.
Another example of how the differences between European and American manufacturing can ruin a car completely. The Euro Escort was a decent car, fully competitive against the Golf and it’s likes (as was the Opel Ascona J-car.) The Golf finally came out on top, strangely enough helped by the fact that Ford imported Brazilian made Escorts, that were complete rubbish (allthough they looked exactly like their European brethren) which just ruined what little reputation for quality Ford may have still had at the time…
Absolutely, the Euro Escort Mk3 was (from memory) the most competent and serious competitor to the Golf through the 80s. A well remembered, class leading car on this side of the pond.
There was a neat summary of the competition between the Golf GTi and the Escort XR3i on the former’s episode of Clarkson’s Car Years , it’s here:
…on YouTube if you skip to around the 2 minute mark (alternatively skip in to 1 minute 50 to see Clarkson getting punched in the face, always worth watching).
Essentially the Ford & VW were viewed as equals in the UK, the only difference being in their images.
Strange to read that the US spec version was such a failure, but it can’t have been too many chefs engineering departments spoiling the stew if the recipe baked to perfection in Ford’s European kitchens can it? Perhaps US Federal regs spoiled th
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