The worst Fords ever | Drive Flashback

It wouldn't have seemed fair to single just Holden as the maker of below-average Australian cars. You can check out the Lion's Honour Roll here. This time around, we're picking on the Blue Oval which, while it has produced plenty of good and even great cars for the Australian market, has also in its long and storied local history, produced some stinkers.

Never one to pull punches, former Drive editor Tony Davis applied the blowtorch to some of the Blue Oval's biggest blunders, engineering mis-steps and sometimes just plain ugly cars from Ford's catalogue of over 90 years of local production.

Lists like this are a surefire to start debate so please feel free to add your two cents' worth in the comments below. And if you own, or have owned, one of these supposedly unloved cars from Ford, let us know about your real-world experience in the comments below. RM

Story by Tony Davis originally published on 24 June, 2011

Well come on, we had to follow up the Holden one. So what are the worst Fords?

If we stick only to Fords sold in Australia, herewith is the starting point for pistols at dawn.

It might have worked if Mazda – which Ford partly owned – didn't do everything better. The MX-5 was from the heart, the Capri from the parts bin. The styling was questionable, the build quality ghastly, the handling Laser-like and, if the Capri had a soul, that would have leaked, too.

A little piece of nastiness imported from Kia of South Korea. It was based on the superseded Mazda 121, presumably on a day the photocopier wasn't working properly.

You know when the legendary and much-loved band get back together and they're all bald and one of them has a walking cane and the singer has been replaced because he died of congestive heart failure a decade earlier? That's what this 1992 effort brought to mind. There were afterthought bits stuck on everywhere and the stated 200kW output was nothing if not optimistic.

This was a lard-nosed version of the Falcon Hardtop with squared-off side openings and a vinyl roof to hide ugly welds. Sales were slow, so was it. In case anyone mistook this fat, heavy and ponderous machine for a sports car, the American term "personal coupe" was adopted.

The four-cylinder was merely dull, the six-cylinder was downright spiteful. It combined Falcon economy with Cortina interior space, plus Ford of England fit-and-finish and Olympic-standard understeer. The cabin had a habit of filling with fumes. Look at what the Japanese were doing in the early 1970s and it's obvious why the Cortina wasn't long for this world.

If the buck-toothed, cross-eyed frontal treatment and droopy tail weren't enough, the build quality was grotesque. Ford quickly put a spoiler on the back and the ute grille on the front to disguise a basic shape that was wronger than wrong. Cleaning up the other glitches took longer.

Can't remember this one, can you? The pudgy, designed-for-America version of the Laser was forgettable but for its extravagantly inset wheels, apparently to allow fitment of chains in snowy climes. Great.

A rebadged 1986 Nissan Pintara, possibly sold with the logic that if you give a skin disease a different name, it might become desirable. Fortunately only a few hundred people were fooled.

As with the later AU, it was a major model change that went badly. Very badly. Build quality was lamentable, even by 1988 standards, and it had a live rear axle, a three-speed auto and the standard engine fitment was a 3.2-litre six that just couldn't be bothered.

Just how did they think this droopy, half-melted, ovoid American had a place Down Under? The only joy was that it reminded us what the Falcon would look like if the Americans had it all their way.

This bulky "towncar" stumbled on to the stage in 1999 and the same sheet metal was still up there in 2007. By that time, the only takers were cabbies paying not a lot more than Falcon money. Ford's great success of the 1960s and ’70s had been run completely into the ground.

Ford is often very adventurous with its small cars (think Ka) and it sometimes works. This be-finned small car from 1959, though, didn't. Even the name suggests angles, of which the car had far too many, and none of them pleasant.

It appeared in Ford dealerships briefly in 2001, was converted in Australia to right-hand-drive and priced from $85,000. Yep, $85,000 for a car that was crude, pudgy, cramped, full of cheap plastics, none-too-quick and dodgy in the handling stakes. When someone paid full price, Ford rang a bell and held a little ceremony.

Agree with our list? Or think we've missed the mark? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comment below?