“Judged by two thousand and won” says the opener for this ad for the fifth-generation Ford Escort, launched in 1990.
Who did the judging? Fleet operators, apparently – magazine Fleet News asked two thousand of them to rate the best saloon up to 1400cc for their business, and the answer that came back was the shiny new Escort.
If you’re sensing some disconnect here, it might be because this car, currying so much favour with the nation’s company car keyholders, is the very same vehicle that in the press got more of a panning than the last flecks of shiny metal during the California gold rush.
Autocar’s cover stories are the most legendary, from its “Ford’s new Escort meets its rivals . . . and loses” in August 1990, to a distinctly average 6-out-of-10 road test a few months later, and its ignominious inclusion as the mag’s “most disappointing” car of that year in its year-end roundup. But other mags weren’t much more glowing about Ford’s middle-of-the-road, phoned-in family car.
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to realise why fleet operators loved it, though. The ad quotes things like quality, reliability, and performance as advantages. Far be it from us to cast doubt on these businesspeople of the early 1990s, but we suspect the real answer was much simpler: Ford would happily shift tens of thousands of the things onto fleets at prices operators simply couldn’t turn down, they could get them serviced absolutely anywhere, and there was so little meaningful competition that could be acquired in such vast numbers that most fleet operators didn’t offer much beyond Fords to begin with.
Of course, there are a few amusing qualifying statements in the ad copy that don’t exactly need a magnifying glass for you to read between the lines. One is that “saloon up to 1400cc” limit, which effectively meant only two Escorts were in the running: the absolute cheapest 1.3- and 1.4-litre models.
The next is use of the term “driver acceptability” as one of the factors for selection. If there’s an adjective more damning in its faint praise of the fifth-gen Escort than “acceptable,” we’re yet to hear it. And the final detail is a grim inevitability even the critical press knew of the new Escort: Given its similarly underwhelming predecessor had been a bestseller for eight years straight, even Ford’s minimal-effort newcomer would still sell.
We’re merely repeating contemporary sentiment, of course, and poking a bit of fun at an ad that perhaps clutches at various straw-shaped objects. Like other maligned family conveyances of its period, these Escorts are prime Festival of the Unexceptional material, and we can’t help but be fond of them for that reason.
Back in the early 1990s, we suspect more than a few sales reps were disappointed to find out they’d only been granted a 1.4-litre version of the car that got skewered in the motoring press. Today though, the owners of the cars that remain surely feel nothing but pride.
