shot in Mexico City by RiveraNotario
The Fox program started out as a replacement for three cars: the Pinto, Maverick and Mustang. Once its 105′ wheelbase was established, it was too big too be a Pinto replacement; that was given over to the Escort. And then it was planned for it to be a world car, to be built in Europe and Latin America, and Australia too? But it turned out that in Europe, Ford’s car plants were set up for the engine to be lifted up into the engine bay from below, whereas in the US the engines were dropped down from above. It would have cost more to change all the plants than to just have the Europeans have their own car.
But who at Dearborn back in 1975 or so would have guessed that the Fox would spawn such a wide and long line of offshoots? Nobody.
The Fox era was long and huge, but it’s finally coming to an end, mostly. There will be Mustangs and a few others around for posterity, but as regular cars on the streets, the numbers are getting mighty thin. I haven’t seen a Fairmont in too long. It’s good to know that this one in Mexico City is still at it.
One of the first CC pieces I can recall reading after this became an independent site was on a brown Fairmont. All these years later, it is kind of amazing that one of these is still around and serving as yet another jumping-off point for discussion.
At the time these reminded me of some of the early 60s compacts, in being thin, lightweight and plain. Those were my favorite attributes of these cars.
I have relayed, on another site, my experience as an owner of a Fox body, specifically a 78 Zephyr Z-7. The Cliffs Notes version, is the thing was in the shop monthly, for the two years I had it. Ran into the next owner one evening. The first words out of his mouth, after I said I used to own that car were “you have a lot of trouble with it?”. as the car had continued it’s failure-prone ways.
Given my history with that platform, my usual reply on that other site, whenever anyone brings up a Fox body is “kill all Fox bodies with fire”. That comment had me threatened with FB jail, for saying “kill”. I protested. Then a human looked at my comment, rather than their automatic word scanner, saw the context, and I was returned to a state of grace.
I have owned a couple used Fords in the 45 years since then, but have never bought another Ford new.
You found a real live human at FB? No such luck here, they never even acknowledged my appeal and ‘jailed’ me for a month. Maybe Covid killed all FB’s humans and now it’s all run by machines? 🙂
I’m not sure if the Fox/Fairmont was a good car, but I always thought it was a brilliant design. I’ll never know what Ford used as inspiration, but to me it always felt like an Americanized version of the Volvo 100/200 series cars. And those were very good cars.
but to me it always felt like an Americanized version of the Volvo 100/200 series
I can’t recall if it was Motor Trend, or R&T, as I read both then, but one had their headline, in a Fairmont road test, as “Ford builds a Volvo”. I had wheel time in a 1974 145. The Fox body was no Volvo.
Car and Driver. GN ran that article here some years ago.
This one here:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/vintage-reviews/vintage-review-1978-ford-fairmont-mercury-zephyr-functional-but-flavorless/
It’s now difficult to remember, as the Volvo gained a reputation for quality and durability, but in the earlier years of the 100/200 series, Volvo had some dismal quality problems. Fuel systems – both the dual carburetors and early implementations of EFI – were problematic. Bad steel led to fast rusting issues. And etc. They didn’t become truly great cars until the late 70s or early 80s.
the earlier years of the 100/200 series, Volvo had some dismal quality problems….Fuel systems…. Bad steel led to fast rusting issues.
Yes, the 145 I had wheel time in did rust at a rapid pace, as did many other cars in the mid 70s. A coworker of mine had 3-4″ wide patches of bubbling paint on the tops of the front fenders of his Accord when it was no more than 4 years old.
Fuel system issues? My Zephyr would flood when I parked it. If it sat for a half hour or more, it would start OK. But if I tried to restart after only 3-5 minutes, I would have to grind and grind the starter to blow the excess gas out of it. The shop found the problem was the metering needle not fitting in the seat correctly, so the carb drooled gas into the manifold when it was parked. The choke always came off too fast. There was one left turn I had to make on the way to work. When a break in oncoming traffic arrived, I would tip into the accelerator. The accelerator pump would give it enough gas to pull the car into the lane of oncoming traffic, then it would sit there and sputter for a few seconds, before finally catching and lurching through the intersection. The engine carboned up horrendously. After the car had 8-10K on it, punching the gas would blow a huge cloud of soot out of the exhaust, and it pinged uncontrollably. A coworker had a new 79 Mustang, also with a 302. His ran the same.
And then there were the behavior of the shocks and brakes. It was no Volvo.
Kill all Fox bodies with fire!
Too bad Fox wasn’t initially planned as FWD, like the K car. It could have had a standard wheelbase to replace Maverick, be shortened a bit to replace Pinto, and then stretched a bit to replace the mid-size cars, eliminating need for expensive Taurus platform. Aspen/Volare were outdated as soon as Fairmont debuted, but Fairmont was outdated as soon as 1980 X cars debuted. Of course, then the problem would have been what to do about Mustang?
I feel like Fox sedans devolved stylistically during their run. The Fairmont was clean and purposeful looking on its release. It was rather progressive in its efficient use of space and rejection of unnecessary stylistic excesses that only added weight, increased wind noise, degraded quickly, and served as a cornerstone of planned obsolescence. The Fox Granadas that followed looked much more like products of the mid-seventies than the Fairmonts did. I remember being surprised by how austere they were inside when lightly equipped, relative to the volumes of chrome and needless styling details ladled onto their exteriors. Fairmonts, on the other hand, looked like cars for people who cared more about driving than they did about what their neighbors thought of what was in their driveways.
On the other hand, my impression that a Fairmont could be a driver’s car was based on Car and Driver articles I read when I was less than ten years old. By the time I got my license in 1985, there were no Fairmonts left to drive where I lived.
I have noted on this site more than once that my favorite car rentals when I lived in Manhattan and did not own a car were Ford Fairmonts. They seemed crisp and cleanly designed, had good visibility looking out, retained my comfortable if outdated relationship with RWD, and with the 302 V8, were nicely quick.
But, I never owned one new or used, so it appears some may not have exhibited the results of “Quality Being Job 1”.
Except for the grille, the lead image looks remarkably like a 1978 Malibu.
There was a repost a while back of a combined review of the station wagon versions of the Aspen, Fairmont, and Malibu. Don’t remember the outcome, but they were all definitely comparable.
Something worth noting is that the lighter Fox-chassis Fairmont came at the expense of thinner sheetmetal. In that regard, the heavier, old-tech Mopar compacts at least felt more substantial. The Chevy was somewhere in-between.
This being a design I *should* like – boxy, early 80s, etc, for the most part I have a negative feeling towards Fairmonts; there was one in my neighborhood when I was an early teen (’82/’83?) and it was a very basic one, already beat halfway to death, and owned by a family that on one hand seemed to struggle but also had a serious attitude about it, not endearing themselves in any way. Since then I can’t feel the love for these. (Although I would perhaps clear out some garage space for an ’88 or so Mustang LX 5.0)
We curiously had two of the successors to these, an ’83 and an ’84 mini-LTD at the same time in the late ’80s, early ’90s, one loaded, the other base. Both had their issues, and while good freeway cruisers, were both replaced by non-Ford products. In hindsight, these had to be the most basic type of vehicle ever built with decades of experience building them (normal engines, RWD), and yet there were definitely some heavy wrenching sessions. I can’t 100% blame Ford as they were used when we got them so who knows of their pre-history, but then again Ford isn’t building/selling these types of cars anymore either, so maybe history eventually caught up.
Do I see even here a little bit of a FIAT 130 Coupé ?
I bought a used ’78 Ford Fairmont Futura right after I graduated from college. By then I had sold the Fiat 128 that had a number of issues and I was driving my ’64 Mercury. The Mercury was using way too much oil and I needed a car I could count on as a daily driver. I found the Furtura at a local dealer and really liked the styling and the light blue color. The miles were fairly low for the year but it needed a little love. It was kind of unusual in that it had a 3 speed with the shifter on the floor and but also had A/C. They just got it in on a trade and had not done any work to it yet. The price was good and so I bought it and worked on it while looking for my first career job. I had the car for several years and the problems were limited to the A/C which worked somewhat, blowing cool but not cold air and the clutch had to be replaced despite being fairly new (I was told). It was a good car for me at the time and I had no regrets buying it.
The thing about these that always confused me a little bit was its size classification. Rudiger referenced a comparison between the wagon versions of the Aspen, Malibu and Fairmont. I never understood how the Fairmont could be classified as a compact, but the Malibu (which, to my untrained eye, looks about the same size) was called a midsized car.
Not as nicely finished as a Malibu, I drew a straight line from the Fairmont to that car and not the Citation.
Those size classifications were all screwed up around the time the Fairmont came out. Was the 1978 Cutlass in the same class as a Fairmont? Or the Volare? Or the Granada (that was still sold side by side with the ‘Mont for a few years). The staggared downsizings played havoc with how I thought about different models.
Chrysler billed the 1978 LeBaron (M body) as a “luxury compact” – at that time they still had the Monaco/Fury B body mid-sizers and the Newport/New Yorker C body full-sizers. Than when the B and C were replaced by the R body Chrysler started called the M bodies “mid-sized”, and when the R was dropped in 1981 suddenly the M bodies, now Chrysler’s largest cars, were called “full sized”, just four years after the same cars were “compacts”. They didn’t get any bigger in the interim.
Seems like, size-wise, the Fairmont was neither fish nor fowl, like Ford was trying to cover all their small-to-mid-size bases on the cheap with just one car, with the Escort being their sole subcompact entry to replace the Pinto.
They must have seen the problem when the new, Fox-chassis 1983 LTD was introduced. It was clearly a mid-size with no confusion. The Fairmont’s small-car duties were then taken over by the Tempo/Topaz twins.
I spent a day at various locations of Ford’s test engineering group in Dearborn on a job interview in December 1976. I saw lots of Fox test cars, in hindsight all Fairmont, no Mustangs. It seemed very advanced to me for a domestic car; way ahead of the then-almost-new Granada or Aspen/Volare or GM RWD X-Body, let alone Colonnade. By the way, I also saw prototypes of the 90° 3.8 V6 then, although it didn’t go into production until 1982. Ford gave me an offer but I decided Michigan wasn’t for me. December was a good interview time for my upcoming June graduation, but winter in the Midwest wasn’t enticing to me coming from California.
I like Fox cars. I like their simplicity. I like their honesty. I like that they could get dolled up as an LTD, a Marquis, a Continental, a Mustang, a Thunderbird, a Mark, a Cougar wagon, Cougar sedan, Cougar Coupe or a lowly Zephyr. They were RWD. They were one of the first Fords designed with CAD/CAM. They were everywhere.
But I concede, that they probably had problems their first years. My first Fox was a 1981 Futura. I lived in it daily for a year. It was already used when I got it, but to me it was new, since all I had owned at that time were old Valiants and a CJ5. Never a problem with anything during those 50,000 miles.
My next Fox was a Cougar sedan. Super nice car. Had it a year. Was used before I got it. Was a sweet ride, although obviously styled for someone much older and a woman.
Final Fox, (as for now) – my favorite – a 1992 Mustang 5.0 hatch. Red. Red interior. The Fox Mustang had all the Mustangyness I had to have, plus the practicality of the Fairmont. Not a bit of regret. Loved, loved, loved it. I would love to have another.
So – I am a big Fox fan. I’d take almost any of them, but I would watch for those earlier years and some of those really flaky engine set ups. No turbo, no four, nothing weird like that.
I have a soft spot for the Fairmont having bought used a light blue wagon way back around 1990. A person on the next crescent over had one for sale on Bargainfinder. Rust spots all over but a durable and reliable car with the straight six. We did a long road trip one summer to southern Alberta and that little wagon did us just fine.
Where are they now? The Fox body platform was not a durable one if an owner didn’t take care of their Fairmont, Zephyr, Capri, Mustang, LTD.
I saw a baby-blue Fairmont two-door sedan, 1978 I think, in pristine straight-out-of-the-showroom condition in a mall parking lot about four years ago, wish I’d shot some pics. This seems to have been the least popular Fairmont body style; once the Futura basket-handle coupe became available the two-door sedan sales seemed to slip. I don’t think these were even offered the last few years of Fairmont production.