30 Years Ago Today
When Ford got complacent in 1990, got savage…
When Ford lost the plot, CAR put the boot in
It would never happen nowadays. New car launches are carefully stagemanaged, with reporting journalists handpicked by zealous PRS. Access to the cars is carefully guarded too – say the wrong thing as a new-car magazine, and the manufacturer will stop inviting you to drive their cars. And with nothing to drive, there’s nothing to read; nothing to sell.
CAR’S January 1990 issue demonstrates how this state of affairs came about. After the best part of two decades spent producing affordable, sporty, stylish cars, Ford’s late-eighties output – Cosworth-tuned Sierras aside – repeatedly fell short of the magazine’s expectations.
Richard Bremner spent no fewer than eight pages on a well-argued anti-ford tirade, heralded on a front cover which described the new Fiesta XR2I as ‘duff’. Bremner thundered, ‘[the Fiesta and Escort] are among the least able cars in their class, yet managed to be the best sellers. That’s the strength of the Ford name, its marketing machine and the power of word of mouth’. He noted underhand Ford sales tactics, with salesmen supposedly picking undemanding urban crawls as test-drive routes to avoid allowing unrefined engines and suspension revealing their worst. ‘More serious a problem is the Fiesta’s dull response,’ he adds. ‘You can’t bank on slicing apexes cleanly, because the steering gear is inaccurate – there’s too much rubber in the system… It takes 4.2 turns to cross the rack, the same as the Chrysler Horizon.’
So who was showing up Ford in 1990? Old foe Vauxhall certainly, but more significantly the French tilt of Peugeot and Renault, both bringing engineering sophistication to the mass market. Bremner said of Peugeot, ‘Take the rear suspension, for example, where you find that ingenious torsion cantilevered coil spring and trailing arm arrangement, bolstered by an anti-roll bar. This, according to the Ford men, is an expensive rear suspension system.’ And yet the Peugeots that sported it were cheaper.
Ford was given the chance to answer its charges in the following pages, as Clive Ennos, director of product engineering at Ford, was interrogated by editor Gavin Green. Ennos was clearly keen to keep the conversation on the new XR2I, but Green mercilessly fought the contemporary 205Gti’s corner. Ennos was riled and fought back, ‘Being top of the heap, you expect to be knocked. If the customer wasn’t satisfied, he wouldn’t keep buying our cars. We are not going to change that just to please a few journalists.’ And yet the truth – contained in a last-gasp zinger from Green – was that the Peugeot had outsold the Ford in every market except Britain and Spain.
Just over the page lay another truth. A report on a Ford ‘world car’ project known as CDE21/CDW27. The sketches identify it immediately as what we now know as the first-generation Mondeo. Years later, Ford insiders admitted that one of the car’s greatest influences was the Peugeot 405.