We have a new poster at the Cohort, kevin_xyxl, and he’s just uploaded a raft of really great finds in New York, of all places. I just had to share this one, as it’s a particularly fine Pinto with those none-too common color-keyed wheel covers. It just needs a fake Mercedes grille and three-pointed start on the hood to make it really convincing.
But it’s pretty sweet as it is, and it’s been too long since I’ve seen a Pinto on the streets here. How about you?
I know of quite a few Pintos that moved on to new lives in the mini-modified stock car circuit.
Outside of a museum or classic car show, I haven’t seen any cars from 1974 lately.
I owned a couple Pintos back in the day, so I tend to spot them on the road. I came to Southern California in 2003 and there were a couple daily drivers in my immediate neighborhood including this one:
CC article ’72 Pinto
Since then, they’ve mostly disappeared. People can find a twenty year FWD subcompact for less than $2,000 that offer superior driving dynamics, fuel economy and interior features. Given that, why would anyone choose a Pinto as a daily driver?
Still, the LA Craigslist currently offers a fairly broad selection. For anyone interested, prices range from $500 to $6,200.
There’s one for sale in Austria…for €1,500.
Unsurprisingly (or perhaps surprisingly), it has proper taillamps with separate amber turn signal indicators.
https://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/details.html?id=269951580&damageUnrepaired=NO_DAMAGE_UNREPAIRED&isSearchRequest=true&makeModelVariant1.makeId=9000&makeModelVariant1.modelDescription=pinto&makeModelVariant1.modelId=1&pageNumber=1&scopeId=C&sfmr=false&fnai=prev&searchId=32252574-d7ac-b795-c2df-e3ad0c14882e
I saw an earlier Ford Pinto wagon at a restaurant the other night and the car appeared to be in good shape, I did a double take when I’ve seen that car.
We got a green ’72 wagon around 1980, after the ’79 gas crunch/inflation, used it as my commuter from home to work about 30 mi each way. Bought from friends for $1000, we drove it for about 2 yrs,but got rear ended so hard by a kid that the roof bent in the middle! I bent out the wheel wells and drove it home, then collected $1200 from insurance, so that worked out well! It had the German made Sohc 4 cyl, and with rack & pinion steering and wide radial tires it was quite toss-able! They had a bad rep, but the wagons didn’t blow up when rear ended (luckily for me)…that was a sedan thing. I was sad to lose it, actually, it did OK by me!
“the wagons didn’t blow up when rear ended (luckily for me)”
I was going to say, you got rear ended in a Pinto and lived to tell about it. I never knew the problem didn’t affect the wagons.
Actually, the sedans didn’t either. The Pinto’s safety record was in line with other small cars of that era. The Mother Jones article was wrong, down to exaggerating the number of fire-related Pinto deaths and miscasting the purpose of the notorious memo (it had nothing to do with the Pinto – it was a cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulations requested by the federal government from Ford).
Oddly enough I saw a clean Bobcat hatchback recently in Albany NY. Within the last month.
In ultra-trendy Vancouver, it is rare to see car more than a decade old. As or the Pinto, well, the last one I saw in the wild had to be 1999 or so. A former GF of mine was driving around in one, until her son wrecked it. Like all her cars!
I cannot recall the last time I saw a Pinto of any configuration in the wild. This one must have been in hibernation! Nice post.
Pintos, Mavericks, Torino’s, LTD’s; all faded into history. I really don’t see much old stuff anymore…
Of all the Pintos I liked the wagon best. Those wheelcovers were never common. But that brown paint sure was.
Yeah, those wheel covers don’t look quite right on a Pinto. I guess they could have been an option on the Ford, but I think they were much more common on the Pinto’s upscale Mercury cousin, the Bobcat.
I remember them being offered as part of the Luxury Decor Option in the 1973-74 period. But the few people who ordered an LDO Pinto seemed to usually pop for the upgrade to the styled wheels too. These color-keyed wheelcovers were quite uncommon. I suppose that they were playing off the color keyed wheelcovers on the Maverick LDO of the same time period.
Ah, the Luxury Decor Option, the package that made even the lowliest of Fords a brougham.
Bone stock, hot pink Pinto for sale in Swastika, Ontario (yes, it’s a real place) , $1200.
https://www.kijiji.ca/v-classic-cars/timmins/ford-pinto-1200/1398197242?
Someone tell me what’s up with the hatch decoration in this photo- It’s too high (or low) to be a wing, the track angle prevents cross-bar movement, and the cross-bar blocks the rear-view mirror image.
I think it’s a mid-wing, like on the Merkur and some Mustangs that had bi-level wings. It picks up some of the tumble over the window and directs it downward, keeping the window clean. Hatchback rear windows get dirty fast. Whether this wing actually works well is up for grabs.
Ideally, you find a hatch with wiper in the junkyard. The wiring is probably already in the car, but if not, it will be a pain to hook up. There’s also the problem of matching faded paint.
All things considered, I’ll take the dirty window.
Wow. They’re driving it on period plates. Probably with an annual mileage limit.
And like my now-deceased in-laws from Tully, Onondaga County, it’s a low number. Somehow the in-laws managed to keep the same number (CDA-316) for three or four series of NY plates from the 70’s thru 2011 when my MIL passed at age 91.
The vintage Mercedes in back of the Pinto runs the current NY style which tips a hat – a small one, anyway – to those old blue-on-yellow plates.
Metro NYC, historically, isn’t the instant rust trap you think of Upstate.
Simply put, many Downstaters stay put when foul weather strikes, plus the weather’s a little kinder near the City.
It’s true, you see some surprisingly old cars around the city. But I’m scratching my head for the last time I saw a Vega or a Pinto.
Owned , in my day, two Pinto sedans and a Pinto wagon. All with the bullet proof 2.3 liter four cyl. All three where great cars. The big ugly bumpers on this 74 wagon, was just…sad. Ford is my favorite car company by far, but they really dropped the ball on incorporating the stupid 5mph bumpers. Also worked in the early 70’s, at a factory called Rockwell Standard, Spring Plant. They made, among other styles, leaf springs for Pinto wagons. Thousands and thousnads! A huge warehouse full of leaf springs. At the time we worked 7 days a week, swing shifts. I always wondered, who was buying all the cars and trucks we made springs for. A few years later, they found that NOBODY was! Plant closed down. This was long before just-in-time manufacturing.
There was a house that I passed by occasionally, that had an orange later model hatchback parked in the driveway, for a number of years. I think it has been sold since that time. This image is from Google maps.
My brother tends to own cars in series – as he says, “you learn what goes wrong and how to fix them”. I think his first Pinto was in his late teens, and then there was “Son of Pinto” and “Pinto’s Revenge” – possibly more, but I can only remember those three.
I think he went on to Hondas next. Other series have included Ford pickups, Saab 900s, and since he became a father he’s now on Volvos.
I had seen one, a squire wagon a few years ago on the same street often. I just went to Google street view to see if it was still there. No luck. But oddly enough I found this Maverick in it’s old spot.
The Pinto/Boobcart is on my list of vehicles I’m very pleased almost never assault my eyes any more. Just about everything about them—clear down to their design and clear up to the corporate malfeasance they represent—is offensive to me, so it will never be too long since I’ve seen one.
I know of a few around here, saw this cruising wagon recently.
To my eyes, the Cruising Wagon looked best without the graphics.
Looks like he found this one in Queens although I had to Google Maps it as I’m pretty unfamiliar with Queens. “Fresh Meadows”
I always spent most of my time in Manhattan, where I lived, and Brooklyn. I was more likely to go into The Bronx than Queens. It makes me wonder what wonderful Curbside Classics I’ve missed out on… NYC may not be Eugene or LA but it has plenty of classics around.
The most common pre-1990 car? G-Body Cutlass Supremes. I eventually just stopped photographing them…
They all went *KABOOM*?
In Atlanta, these made it to around 10 years of age maximum and vanished. Small wonder as by 1981 nearly every maker offered infinitely better options. The Omnirizon had four doors plus a larger hatchback, fwd, better economy, and some sportiness and a useable back seat. Even the chevette had a useable back seat and and was a better car than the pinto. A valiant/dart was a better beater as well for not much more money. Name a compelling reason to buy a pinto, especially a used one. That’s where they all went.
Wow! Rare to find an old Pinto. Rarer still that the grill isn’t broken. I noticed way back in the early 1980s that grills of Pintos several years old were almost always missing teeth.
The last one I saw in the wild was in Flin Flon, MB. 2014. It looked to be in decent shape for its age.
The Fox Thunderbird wheel on the back goes oddly well on the Pinto bodystyle, wish it had a matching set
After Motor Trend magazine selected the Vega as “Car of the Year” I recall a man writing in to the letters to the editors section saying he bought a Vega based on their selection. He had traded in his new Pinto on it, which he called a “Pint-O-nothing!” Wonder how he felt about that in a couple of years as the Vega self destructed?
It’s amazing how stunningly bad both the Vega and Pinto were, and it’s one of the few times Chrysler operating on a shoe-string budget actually turned out for the better. They had to wait for six years to get the 1978 subcompact Omnirizon to market (and it was FWD, too), and it was still ahead of the domestic competition (although Ford had brought the German-built Fiesta into the US the same year).
Imagine if Chrysler had put the R&D money they wasted on the E-body toward the Omnirizon and gotten it to market maybe a couple years sooner. They might not have needed Iacocca, after all.
Where are they? They’ve been “put out to pasture.” Or the less fortunate have been “sent to the glue factory.”
These were everywhere in the Southeast up until about 1987 or so. Then, suddenly, they vanished.
Last one I saw here in Houston doing regular street duty was about 3 years ago. I had to do a double take, it had been at least 10 years since I’d seen one before that. And it appeared to be mostly stock, which was a double-shocker.
We had 2 Pintos in succession while I was growing up, a ’73 (?) hatchback and a ’75 Squire Wagon. That wagon drove us across the country from SC to MN and back several times. It was, looking back on it, more reliable (though way less comfortable) than the ’83 Volvo 240 that replaced it in the family fleet. I can still hear that Pinto’s tractor-sounding engine in my memory.
I saw a very nice blue example a few weeks ago parked in a guy’s driveway next to a fox body Mustang. It looked like it was quite possibly his DD because it had salt on it. It’s the first one I’ve seen in many years. I can’t imagine the body will hold up all that well with all the salt my area uses. I wanted to snap a pic but someone was watching me. :/
I saw one recently. It was orange and had nazis in it chasing a Dodge Monaco until it fell off a highway a mile in the sky.
Wasn’t that from the film, Blue Brothers>/i>?
You betcha! One of my favorite movies.
Illinois Nazis.
I hate Illinois Nazis.
We had a fully loaded Pinto Woody Wagon, got terrible gas mileage. I remember the seat were so low and it was like sitting on a Kids Toilet. A real challenge to get in back seat. Drove Fine. Traded for a Volare Wagon, bad move. – billchrest
My first car was a 1972 pinto wagon. Loved that car. Loved in that car many times. Beer tap stickshift, cb radio mounted from the roof. Curtains, sawed-in sunroof, fake fur headliner. Sold it with 120k miles.
I suspect that the tin worm has had its way with most Pintos and they have returned to the earth from which they sprang. Having said that I met a young woman (30ish) this summer who was gradually returning her grandmother’s Pinto to daily driver status. I thought that I had taken some pictures but perhaps not, at least I can’t find them on my phone. She said driving the Pinto was an interesting way to meet people because many people had experienced them in their past. I never owned a Pinto but had quite a bit of seat time in them, mostly as a passenger. They were definitely built to a price, a girl I knew in college had one of the first Pintos sold in our town. The one thing I most remember is that the front passenger seat was not adjustable but was fixed in one place; this must have saved Ford a bunch of money 🙂
Saw a Pinto a month or so ago among a stream of US cars returning from the Mustang club nationals, I was parked roadside having my break, the traffic was interesting for a change and lots of other US cars mixed in with the seemingly thousands of Mustangs lots of nice classic models, too many new ones and the odd brumby mixed in.
They werent sold here but as usual some have immigrated.
I doubt there’s a DD Pinto anywhere, but there always seem to be a couple of hobbyist/barn cars popping up on Craigslist (though seemingly never in Salt Belt states). My 1980 wagon never missed a beat—and I suppose this low-mile Squire could be a fun toy for me at $2K. If it was anywhere where I could reasonably drive it home, I’d be interested: https://dallas.craigslist.org/dal/cto/d/1980-ford-pinto-squire/6763510810.html
I had a base model 1973 Pinto sedan (not a hatchback) for a year and a half. Bought in 1978. 1.6 litre ohv 4, 4 speed and power nothing. Base interior with rubber floor mats instead of carpeting. It was a very reliable and economical car. During that time I put about 20,000 miles on it. During this time the national speed limit was 55mph, and you really could not drive it at 55. You could go 50 or 60, but at 55 the engine resonated like crazy and shook the whole car! An overdrive gear would have solved this but was not available.
Unfortunately it rusted to pieces in our Wisconsin Winter.
Bob
Should have added it was a 1973 model.
A base model (Pony) 1980 wagon, white with blue vinyl interior, was.my college car. 2.3Lima with 4speed manual. No power anything. It was a simple, honest car which served me reliably. I took my (now) wife on our first date in that car.
I dream that I will soon find one to restore/clone. This time whoever, the 2.3L four pot will be the new EcoBoost version from a Mustang…and a 6 speed. 300 bhp would be better than the 88bhp the Lima reluctantly produced!
My personal experience with the 74 Pinto wagon is very personal. My mother had one and when I came home for Easter vacation long, long ago I went out for a drive in it. I was going down a winding road and there was a sharp hairpin turn to the left. There was also a gravel road that was just off to the right versus straight ahead. I headed that way till I realized my mistake and turned the wheels, braked, and hit the gravel.
In between those two options was a slight berm as on the other side was a small gulley with a large metal culvert in it. The Pinto slid on the gravel, hit the berm, went up in the air, and landed on the culvert at about a 60 degree incline. Just great I thought. Then the engine compartment caught fire. Oh really just great now. A house up the gravel road heard the noise and called police and fire as they told me this was all too common.
Naturally my mother was none too happy and when the car returned from fixing it wasn’t the same. I could actually run faster across an intersection than the car could head to head. It was so bad that I called the Ford District office and told them if it wasn’t straightened out I would park in front of the dealer with a sign on the car. The District office did actually have the car brought in to handle the severe lack of power. Nonetheless, when 1978 came around the Pinto was traded in on a BMW 320i.
I spent many an unhappy hour as an adolescent of above average height in the back seat of a powder blue Pinto wagon. The back seat of the LeSabre Turbo Coupe that followed the Pinto in 1978 was heavenly in comparison.
I remember going on vacation to Orange Co., California in ’86 and was amazed to see so many rust free Pintos. By then, in IL, most pre-1978’s [square lights] were scrapped.
Also amazed at clean, 70’s Japanese cars, too. But, no Vegas or Gremlins on the Freeways.
The 1979 and ’80 Pintos were the best of the lot. They had much better overall styling and the new aluminum bumpers were pulled in closer to the body for a more cohesive look. But I never liked how low they were and how you fell into them. They had abysmal ergonomics.
Hi I had a 1974 pinto runabout awful mustard yellow, uncorked the exhaust, polished the carb and intake, with the 4 speed was getting solid burnouts 1st and 2nd chirping 3rd.
With wide tires front and back the low wide stance gave great handling, the 2.3 engine would rev past 5000 if you want to replace the rubber timing belt once a year. Would run Porsche, Vega, lots of camaro and mustang down on the twisty roads of Massachusetts
Fold down rear seats made a great place to relax and enjoy restful relaxation with the gal, plus throw some lead bars and a couple sand bags we used that car for ski trips all through New England skis would fit inside.