Wouldn't touch an old Escort with a bargepole? Led Shed try to convince you otherwise…
By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 21 July 2023 / Loading comments
Escort Cabriolet. You might say that you would prefer Madame Cholet, but don’t be hasty. Today’s shed is a 1997 example from the sixth and last generation of the Escort line which ground to a final halt in 2000, two years after its successor, the Focus, came out. Overlaps like that used to be quite common in the motor industry. Production of the gen-five Escort finished in 1995, the year of the gen-six’s arrival, but you could still buy gen-fives right up until 1997. Many folk preferred to stick with what they knew back then. Plus Ford had made too many and wasn’t going to throw them away.
The 1.8 EFI Zetec twin-cam engine in this one put out 113hp, a veritable dribble by modern standards but not that much less than the base Mk 4 Golf GTi was putting out at the time. One thing’s for sure, the Zetec engines were vastly superior to the old CVHs, being both a lot revvier and also more than adequately torquey for mooching around. The Mk 6 generally was a much better drive than the Mk 5, although of course the Focus instantly relegated both of them to the Fred Flintstone era.
On most gen-six Escort models the Ford blue oval badge at the back moved to the centre of the bootlid but not on the convertibles, because that central space was needed for the ‘high level’ brake light. While we’re on the subject of badges, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the outside but this one’s a Ghia. The only badge giving you that information is the one on the fashionably squashed dash clock. Please note the luxuriant Wood® surrounding it, lovingly hewn from solid lumps of plastic harvested from beautiful factories. Notice also the fog light switch coyly previewing Ford’s upcoming New Edge styling revolution. The cabin plastics generally were not revolutionary but you could say that about a lot of the Escort’s contemporary rivals.
The vendor tells us that the power roof has been disconnected. Not all Escort Cabriolet roofs were power operated, but if this one was it has either failed on its own account or someone has brought failure upon it in order to remove the constant wondering about when it was going to fail.
Unfortunately, the best-known website for finding out how many cars are left knocking about is practically unfathomable so all we can tell you is that the number of Escorts registered to run around UK roads could be as low as 20. More interestingly the number of SORN’d convertibles, i.e. those stored off the road, has been steadily rising over the years pretty much in parallel with the steady drop in registered ones, and could now be as high as 250.
This suggests a belief in the market that more or less any old Ford is eventually going to be worth money. There could be something in that too because many of you reading this will have spent your formative motoring years in random old Fords and there’s nothing like nostalgia to inflate prices. And the Escort name does bring some excitement with it, as Shed found to his physical discomfort courtesy of Mrs Shed’s saucepan when he rang up about one once and Dirty Gertie turned up on the doorstep, moonlighting from the village chip shop.
Anyway, stellar values are probably still a fair way off for the Mk 6 Escort but if you believe in the power of nostalgia and have a dry garage or lockup you might want to buy this one now and move it over from the road-registered list to the SORN’d list. The current price of £1,495 is £500 less than it was only a week or so ago, it’s only done 84,000 miles, and there’s a cherry on top in the form of a cleanly passed MOT test.
Looking back through the MOT history will either scare you or reassure you, depending on your approach to life. Just about anything that could have happened to it has already happened to it but the owners have stayed true to the cause and kept it not only going but also, by the looks of it, solid. The weak areas are, well, just about anywhere, but you can start with the inner and outer sills and go on to the rear chassis legs, belt anchorage areas, boot doubling up as a swimming pool etc etc (add etcs to fit your personal experience).
If this example is genuinely solid then that makes it a very rare beast indeed. Buy it, slap some Waxoyl on it, park it up and forget it until it’s reached a silly value. Or if you’re really mad, drive it. Your mates will call you names and tell you it’s rubbish, and that by extension you must be rubbish too, but when you take them out in it they might have to admit that these late Escorts are actually a decent ride. Unlike Gertie. For a driver’s eye view Shed refers you to HubNut’s excellent effort in which Mr Nut slowly warms to it.
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