By 1990 the Ford Escort was the bestselling car on the planet. In Britain, one in every eight new cars sold carried the name. It had survived three decades of change, four million sales, and a reputation built as much in the forests of rally stages as in suburban showrooms. Then, after 33 years, it was gone, the name quietly retired, the car that once stood on nearly every driveway all but vanished from the roads.
The question of how that happened is a story about a company that forgot what made it great. The Escort began life in 1968 as a replacement for the aging Ford Anglia. Ford had just welded its British and German operations into a single enterprise, Ford of Europe, and the new car was the first designed to sell in the same shape across the whole continent. The name was a hand-me-down, pulled from a drawer where it had sat since Ford used it in the 1950s for a stripped-out estate version of the Anglia.
There was no poetry in it at first. The car shown at the Brussels Motor Show in January 1968 was almost defiantly plain, a light, rear-wheel-drive saloon powered by Ford’s trusty Kent engine. It was cheap, sensible, and engineered down to a price. It worked immediately, undercutting its rivals and outselling them.
But the Escort was about to become something its makers never planned. It was light, simple, and rear-wheel drive, which made it perfect for rallying. A skilled driver could hang the tail out and steer the car on the throttle through muddy forest stages at night. Ford saw this early and treated fast Escorts as a business, not a hobby.
In 1970, the company set up Advanced Vehicle Operations in Essex, a dedicated production line for performance cars, and behind those stood the competitions department at Boreham, a former airfield where engineers prepared rally Escorts for the forests of Europe. Out of this came the legendary models: the Twin Cam with its Lotus engine, the RS1600 with a Cosworth-developed 16-valve engine, and the Mexico, named after Ford’s victory in the 1970 World Cup Rally from London to Mexico City. The Escort became a giant killer, winning rallies it had no business winning against more powerful machinery, simply because it was lighter and tougher. The MK2 arrived in 1975, bringing the RS2000 with its distinctive droop snoot and a face you could pick out from fifty yards down a wet forest track.
It became a boy racer’s dream and a police pursuit car. Rally heroes like Roger Clark, the first Englishman to win the RAC Rally in 1976, drove Escorts through the forests of Britain while thousands stood in the freezing dark to watch. In 1979, Ford won the World Rally Championship for manufacturers with the Escort, and the RS badge stopped being a model code and became something close to scripture. By the end of the 1970s, the word Escort no longer meant a sensible small saloon.
It meant winning. Ford had earned something money cannot buy: love. In 1980, Ford made a bet that horrified the faithful and turned out to be exactly right. The rear-wheel-drive Escort was killed off, replaced by the MK3, a front-wheel-drive hatchback developed under the code name Erica.
To the purists it felt like heresy, but the world had moved on. Volkswagen had rewritten the rules with the Golf GTI, and Ford needed to follow or be left behind. The MK3 sold in numbers that made its predecessors look modest and won European Car of the Year. In 1981 came the XR3, and in 1983 Ford added a single letter to create an icon: the XR3i, the first fuel-injected Ford sold in Britain.
That lowercase i stood for fuel injection and turned a warm hatch into a genuinely hot one. It became the bestselling hot hatch in the country, the car on every young man’s bedroom wall. Above it sat the RS1600i and, from the mid-1980s, the RS Turbo, sold only in white until a single black one was built by special request for Diana, Princess of Wales. The MK4 arrived in 1986, an evolution rather than a revolution, quieter and better screwed together.
Around two million MK3 and MK4 Escorts were sold across the 1980s. But something was shifting quietly inside the formula that built the empire. The company car had exploded in Britain, a quirk of the tax system that meant employers handed cars to reps and managers by the hundreds of thousands. More and more Escorts were being chosen not by people spending their own money with their own hearts, but by fleet managers choosing on price and running costs.
Fewer buyers were choosing the car. More were being handed the keys. And the center of gravity inside Ford was moving too, from the engineers and designers who asked how a car drove to the product planners, marketers, and cost accountants with their clipboards and customer clinics. They had learned a poisonous lesson: that the Escort would sell whatever Ford did to it, that the badge did the heavy lifting.
The place where the Escort was actually built was Halewood on Merseyside, opened in the early 1960s on the eastern edge of Liverpool. For a generation of Liverpudlians, the car was never a poster but a wage packet collected on a Friday. The plant was a rhythm around which thousands of lives were ordered, the press shop thumping, the body shop storming with sparks, the trim lines quieter and more human. And the glamorous XR3i was not what kept the lights burning.
It was the plain white Escort van, the workhorse bought by plumbers, sparkies, and the Post Office in tens of thousands, that underwrote the entire enterprise. Nobody photographed the van. Nobody pinned it to a bedroom wall. But years later it would literally keep Halewood’s gates open longer than they’d otherwise have stayed.
There was another thing about Halewood. When Ford bought Jaguar in 1989, the manufacturing chief Bill Hayden went to see how Britain’s most famous luxury cars were built and was appalled, saying more or less plainly that the Jaguar factories were among the worst he had seen anywhere in the world. The benchmark in his head was the standard already being met day in and day out by the men and women assembling the ordinary Escort at Halewood. The humble car had taught the standards for the grand one.
By 1990, standing at the summit of its success, Ford could do no wrong. The company prepared to launch the most eagerly awaited car it had made in a decade, the first all-new Escort in ten years. Inside the company it went by the program name CE14, and Ford poured a fortune into it, around a billion pounds, more than it had ever spent on a single car in its history, over five years of development. The program’s design was overseen by Helmut Schrader, who would later be honest about the philosophy: the goal was not to build the finest driving small car in Europe but to build a car that would win customer clinics, the market research sessions where the public is shown cars side by side and asked which they prefer.
CE14 was engineered to produce market research winners. The enthusiasts would later call it a car clinked to death. You can see the logic. Give the customers precisely what the research says they want.
Take no risks. But the research could never measure the thing that made an Escort an Escort: the way it steered on a give-and-take road at dusk, the eagerness in the throttle, the quiet confidence it handed to a nervous driver. The clinic measures what people can point to in a stationary car under fluorescent light. It was permanently blind to everything the Escort had spent twenty years being loved for.
The trap was already closing, and Ford couldn’t feel it. That’s how complacency works. In 1989, a plain boxy Italian family car called the Fiat Tipo was named European Car of the Year, clever and roomy and galvanized against rust, a genuine step forward. Coming in 1991 were all-new versions of the Vauxhall Astra and the Volkswagen Golf.
The bar for the entire class was being lifted sharply at the precise moment Ford was preparing to try to clear it. And neither the Astra nor the Golf was a work of genius. Ford managed to lose the most loyal following in British motoring to cars that were merely decent. Inside Ford, two things had gone quietly wrong.
The first was fear, and it had a name: the Sierra. Back in 1982, Ford had replaced the beloved Cortina with the radically aerodynamic Sierra, which the country nicknamed the jelly mold and then declined to buy in the numbers Ford had banked on. The Sierra came good in the end, but the fright never left the building, and the lesson Ford drew was the timid one: no more surprises, no more risks. That single instruction, no experiments, hardened into the guiding spirit of the new Escort.
The second thing was that the engineers and designers had been steadily subordinated to the product planners and cost accountants. The men who measured had beaten the men who made, gradually, reasonably, one budget meeting at a time. And then came bad timing. Ford had a brilliant new family of 16-valve engines in development, called Zeta, but they were not ready.
Rather than wait a year for the good engine, Ford launched its staggeringly expensive new Escort with the old coarse CVH engine first seen a decade earlier, and in the cheapest cars an even older pushrod unit whose roots reached back to the Anglia. It looked at the car meant to define the entire decade, saw last decade’s engine bolted into it, and pressed go regardless. Three decisions in particular sealed the fate. The first was about the suspension.
The outgoing Escort had a properly sorted independent rear suspension. The new car got a cheaper torsion beam rear axle, and at launch Ford left off the front anti-roll bar altogether. Together these gutted the way the car drove. Turn it into a corner and it leaned, wallowed, pushed wide into understeer.
It handled worse than the car it replaced. The second decision was the engine, which thrashed and boomed and sent coarse vibration through the pedals and steering wheel on every journey. The third was the styling. Offend no one, startle no one, and the design team obeyed so faithfully that the all-new car looked like a mild facelift of the car it replaced.
There was nothing to catch the breath. The car sold anyway, because the order books were being filled by the fleets, buyers who chose on list price and discount and fuel economy, none of whom could feel the wallow or hear the boom. The sales chart stayed healthy. Behind it, something was quietly dying.
On the 29th of August 1990, the reckoning arrived in print. The magazine was Autocar and Motor, the Bible of the British motoring enthusiast, and its verdict on the new Escort was a demolition. The question that would haunt Ford for years: How can Ford have got it so wrong? Then in October came the full instrumented road test.
Two stars out of ten. A car that had swallowed a billion pounds, carrying the most valuable nameplate the company owned, marked two out of ten by the people who understood small cars best. The number broke a spell. For twenty years the badge had done the selling.
In one October issue, it was simply gone. The Escort did not stop selling. It came second in the British sales charts in 1990, second again in 1991, then climbed back to number one in 1992 with 121,000 cars sold. At very nearly the same moment, a survey of owners voted the Escort one of the least satisfying cars a Brit could own.
The bestselling car in Britain and one of the least satisfying cars in Britain were the same car. People kept buying it because the fleets kept ordering it, while the reputation quietly rotted from the inside out. The values slid. Nobody wanted the plain silver saloons secondhand.
Almost nobody kept one. It had been built to be bought, not loved. Out of the humiliation came change. In April 1991, a Ford engineer named Richard Perry Jones, a Welshman who had been with the company since 1969, was made chief vehicle engineer and given the job of fixing the wounded Escort.
His creed was simple: it is worth spending a little more to make a car meaningfully better to drive, because the driver can always feel it. The engineers took back the whip hand from the accountants. Within two years Ford reworked the Escort with sorted suspension and the modern 16-valve engines, renamed from Zeta to Zetec. And in March 1992, at the Geneva Motor Show, came the halo: the Escort RS Cosworth, barely an Escort at all, with four-wheel drive and 227 horsepower and that enormous double rear wing, the whale tail.
It was handbuilt by the German coachbuilder Karmann, and in its first full season it took five rounds of the World Championship. It was living proof that Ford still had it in them. That engineering culture went on to produce the Mondeo in 1993, praised for exactly the driving finesse the Escort had thrown away. And in 1998, Ford launched the Focus, everything the flawed Escort had not been: bold, brilliant to drive, distinctive.
It was the vindication of everything the disaster had taught. The Focus replaced the Escort, and the name, after 33 years, was gently retired. The last Escort came off the line at Halewood at the end of the year 2000. But Halewood did not fall silent.
The plant was handed to Jaguar to build the X-Type, the same Merseyside hands that had built the humble Escort carrying on under a grander badge. Down at Dagenham, car assembly came to an end in 2002, closing some seventy years of building cars beside the river. 4. 1 million Escorts were sold in Britain alone.
And then the name was simply gone. The whale-tailed Cosworths are cherished now, worth fortunes, shown at concours. And the plain silver saloons have all but vanished from the roads, because almost nobody in the end loved one enough to keep it.
A car so unloved that it disappeared, from a name so loved, should never have been possible.