These aerobirds, especially the plain-vanilla versions like this one, are at risk of extinction. They appeared out of nowhere in 1983, and multiplied exceedingly quickly. Even in California, which was so anti-domestic at the time, these became as common as starlings or crows. But now they’re at danger of extinction.
We’ve covered the Turbo-Coupe version several times here, including this CC and my Auto-Biography of my TC. And Jason did a CC on an Elan version way back in 2012. But this is a base version of Ford’s re-sculptured Thunderbird. And probably with the 3.8 V6 under its long beak.
By 1986, the carry-over dash from the previous Box-Bird had finally been replaced by something thta looked a bit more organic to the rest of the design. And that went for the steering wheel too.
If I had to guess, this is a classic old lady-mobile, which led a very sheltered and pampered life, which explains its current state, thta more closely resembles a three year old car instead of a thirty-two year-old car. A rare bird indeed.
This have grown on me greatly over the years. A fine catch of a dying breed, indeed.
And, as luck would have it, I work two doors down from where I spotted the Elan in 2012. It’s still parked there frequently so it’s still doing its thing.
The first photo makes it plain how much overhangs (esp. rear overhang) have shrunken in 3 decades. Nowadays it’s rare to find a car where the plastic bumper caps don’t extend all the way to the wheel openings.
the overhangs are still there, just hidden behind the bumper covers
Know how cars all have that angry eyed grin now a days? That’s the effect of the corners being pulled back, like a botched facelift, on the still long front overhang. Rear overhangs have though, the MN12 followup has substantially shorter overhangs, especially rear for roughly the same length, due to the 9″ longer wheelbase.
All in the name of aerodynamics. In that sense the Aerobird was a pioneer in this pulled-back-corners trend. Not only were the front corners pulled back compared its slab-faced predecessor, there is pronounced tapering of the front fenders when in overhead view.
Overhangs, especially rear hangs, are much shorter now. Plus the wheel openings are larger to house 17″, 18″, 19″ wheels, further shortening the stretch between wheel opening and bumper.
The mid-size Aerobird had a wheelbase of 104″ Today’s compact cars such as Civic and Corolla have wheelbases longer than 106″ The RWD Aerobird had longer front overhang than most of today’s FWD cars.
The distinctive species of long-low-wide long-overhang American cars is extinct today.
1983 Aerobird: 104″ wheelbase, 198″ overall length
2017 Corolla: 106″ wheelbase, 183″ overall length
The tire height is what matters as far as wheel opening diameter, wheel size can accomidate numerous different aspect ratios to keep the same height. Thunderbirds had 215 70 14s, which are just a hair under 26″ tall, and have a quite substantial gap around the tire and edges of the opening, where a 27″ tall tire/wheel (as common now on cars this size) would easily be accommodated, it just may have a 4×4 or donk stance if you do so because the body is so much shorter. Modern cars have quite small gaps around the tire for aero, so I don’t think the overhangs on this are exaggerated from that aspect, they just really are that long.
This is getting a bit off topic but i suspect that extinction has in some way contributed to the practical decline of the sedan. Make fun of the rear overhangs on these but they made for big deep trunks. My 94 Cougar, with substantially shorter overhangs than these have plenty of space to the rear seat but the vertical depth kind of stinks because the rear suspension goes so far back. Modern cars have remedied this with vertical growth of the beltline but that has it’s own issues.
You can make the look work with big wheel diameters. The shape is so modern that it does not look out of place.
Great find. One of the best domestic styling efforts of the 80s. Thirty years later and it doesn’t look significantly out of place on the road beside modern designs.
An elegant exception in a vile decade.
I briefly had one of these back in 2008-09.
Nice overall car, when I bought it it only had 28k miles, but between the 3.8 liter boat anchor & the bad quality 80s Ford paint that chipped & peeled, I got rid of it. With some work though, these cars can be great alternatives to people who don’t want the foxbody Mustang.
These were indeed a breath of fresh air in 1983! They made everything else (including everything else in Ford showrooms) look old fashioned. Especially the “new” 1983 LTD. It is hard to imagine how two cars sharing the same platform and introduced the same year could be so different.
Yeah, IMHO that “new” LTD was just an expedient and awkward facelift of the more handsome – albeit boxy – Granada that I bought the year before.
I also prefer the styling of the Fox Granada to that of the downsized LTD.
To me, the Fox Granada looked more like an LTD than the Fox LTD. The Fox LTD looked more like a redesigned Fairmont Futura. The Aero Bird was unique for the Fox Platform.
Ironically, I traded a ’79 Futura in on an ’83 T-Bird way back then. It was much like the subject care, but an even more Basic Bird. Mine had the standard wheel covers, and yes, that dreaded Essex engine. I still loved it though, and kept it nice as I have done with all my cars.
Mine was that really light gray that looked almost white until it started snowing. Then you could really see that it was in fact gray.
It saddens me that these are nearly extinct. It was probably the first car that hit me hard when it came out, and I just had to have one. At 23, a base ‘Bird like this was all I could afford, but I got one!
The taillights interchange with Fairmont Futura coupe ones.
I think the front clip might be interchangeable too, nlpnt….
That headline is hilarious. My first landlady had one of these. Looked like a undercover cop car.
I love the looks of these cars, and this color combination is my favorite. Before I bought my latest car, a Crown Victoria, I never thought I would ever own a “big” car.
BUT….as Daniel Iorio sort of pointed out, the good and bad thing about these cars is that the Mustang does almost everything the Thunderbird does, but in a more manageable package.
I found my Fox Body Mustang unacceptably cramped. My head was in contact with the headliner, and my shoulder felt cramped. If the TBird cockpit is a bit roomier, I would consider it a great alternative to the pony car.
Great catch Paul and even up I-5 in Portland these Thunderbirds are rare. I found this one back in June and I do not recall if I have seen one since. Amazing how both look in such good shape.
A best friend’s first car was a Dark Clove Brown 5.0 from this model year. An awesome gift from her family, but it was way too much car for her 16 year old self at the time. It was scary enough for us passengers that summer she got it, thinking the throttle was an On/Off proposition, but when you add all that torque and Minnesota winters, it was a recipe for disaster. Her Dad had enough after the third time or so it had to be yanked out of a snowbank, got her a Cavalier, and sold it to one of her older cousins. He had it for a long time after that, and kept it in really good shape for at least 8 years after that if I recall correctly. Sue was always pissed when she saw it around town after losing it (but we weren’t!).
So, ” her daddy took the T-Bird away….”
C’mon down to FSW Fla. sometime, and feast your eyes. Florida is Ford Country, and you can find anything from the postwar years scurrying around the local streets if you’re patient enough. 1980s T’birds – and their cousins, the Cougar and Continental – all are still around…even saddled with that Essex engine. Just keep them from overheating, and they will last.
Nevertheless, my Taurus wagon does quite well enough with the bulletproof Vulcan engine. I wished when I bought it that it had had the bigger engine, but twenty years later I’m happy with what I have.
I tried looking on Craigslist today for a Thunderbird of this generation, could NOT find one in north-central Florida, Atlanta, or central Tennessee. I had better luck with older (60s and 70s) Thunderbirds, though.
I don’t think there’s very many left, either. It’s like these Aero Birds did their work (taking their owners to work, school, the grocery store, et al.) and were worn out and scrapped. Or wrecked in an automobile accident like my ’86 T-Bird was. (The accident wasn’t my fault but the end result was the same: Totaled out T-Bird).
So big for nothing. Couldn’ t bend right or left in whoever street of a normal city like London Milano or Verona .
They bend right or left quite well in New York, Detroit, or Los Angeles.
That’s because New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles weren’t laid out in 1149 AD. 🙂
Those cities are funhouse attractions compared to normal cities in the US. Even dense ones like New York City can handle a 200″ car, just sucks to find parking, but it’s no cakewalk in small cars either.
My neighbor, a private pilot, had an 86′ blue Turbo Coupe for YEARS, and LOVED it.
Put 160000 almost trouble free miles on it too.(he went through several clutches)…
He had nothing but praise for it and it was great looking inside and out.
The last time I saw it it didn’t sound too healthy, (he said the turbo took a dump), and it was soon replaced with a loaded black 93′ Ranger STX supercab 4×4 4 litre v6, another great looking unit and he drove the wheels off it too.
It had 210000 miles on it when he moved to the country in 2001 and ran and looked like new but the tranny was acting up.
He put a new 5 speed tranny in it after he moved, still owns it, and it’s still running fine as of early 2017 with just a tick under 300000 miles.
It’s mainly a farm truck now and the ORIGINAL R12 A/C still works!
These were and still are, the only cars from Ford’s Telnac-aero era that I ever liked. Even the stablemate Cougar looked awful with its straight up roofline and T bird side windows flipped upside down and right for left. Tempo and Topaz? Yuck! Fox body Mustang? Not a line on them that says Mustang, they always looked like they were trying too hard to make a Fairmont sporty, and never succeeded. Taurus? Hideous! Then and now. But that Thunderbird looked right, and the 87 restyle looked even better in my eyes. A co-worker of mine at the time bought a new 87, her first brand new car. I rode in it numerous times and thought it was the nicest thing coming out of a Ford showroom at the time.
These cars were great highway cruisers. I came within an ace of buying one in ice blue in the summer of ’85, 302 V-8 with automatic. I held off for a while and got a Mustang instead.
CC effect! Yesterday I saw a minty ’84 Turbo Coupe. Young kid driving it through my parking lot was clearly several years younger than the car. I gave him the thumbs up.
This vehicle has probably aged better than almost any other 80s design. Still a nice looking car.
I nearly bought one of these off Craigslist when I was shopping for a big Ford two years ago, Some buy-here, pay-here was flogging it for $1999. Way too many problems for even that price. I ended up with a Marquis from a private owner instead.
Rare today, though there are still a few running around my area. A fair number of the ones left, even lower-trim models like this one, seem to be in fair to good shape–agree on them likely being older-owned.
I noticed one interesting quirk of these aero ‘birds a couple of years ago though–you could still get flip-out vent windows. Seems to me that there can’t have been too many aero design cars with this option!
The 1986 Taurus and Sable brochures listed front vent windows as an available option, but they don’t seem to have reached production. I’ve never seen one so equipped, and mention of them was deleted from 1987 and later brochures.
Ford was the last holdout in the US (and anywhere really) in offering front vent windows, keeping them on the option list into the ’90s on some cars, long after other manufacturers dropped them.
Fords from this era with their relatively small rectangular grills reminded me of the Mini Mula robot from the old Ruff n Reddy cartoons.
A Bird in the hand…
The year was 1983. I had just taken a job in ad sales for a new Hampton Roads city weekly called PortFolio Magazine. While I was optimistic about my new employ, I was recovering from the failure of my own city monthly called the Bay Area Review. For the previous 2 years I had slaved 24/7 in an effort to make the publication work. Not only had the experience taken an emotional toll, but financially I was exhausted as well.
I was driving a 1972 Opel 1600 that had seen better days. Most distressing, it lacked air conditioning. In a sales position, you need to arrive at a prospect’s business alert and refreshed. As we were coming into the humid summer months, the need for a new car became apparent.
As I mentioned, I was broke. But I never stiffed anyone and my credit was still good. I visited my old friends at Cavalier Ford (I was a salesman there in summers during college break) and laid out the cards. I drove away in a new dove gray Ford Thunderbird. The Thunderbird was completely redesigned in ’83 and it turned heads. Breaking from the square look that it, and most other cars on the road, had previously embraced, the new ‘Bird made everything else on the road look 10 years old.
My ‘Bird had a 232 cid Essex V-6. But it was the style that hooked me. The rounded corners and slopping lines married to an egg-crate grille was about as fashionable as you could be in ’83.
I suppose it sounds shallow, but that car did more for my self-confidence at the time than anything else I could have envisioned. Hey, you are what you drive, right?
The Aerobirds also proved to be excellent bodies for NASCAR and Pro Stock drag racing. I remeber the GM teams at the time complaining about the ‘Birds obvious aerodynamic advantage over flat back window designs GM were using at the time. Chevy came out with the Monte Carlo SS and later the Aeroback SS and Pontiac Gran Prix 2+2 as a counter. Many consider the 87-88 ‘Birds as the best aero package in NASCAR history.
Of all places I first saw one of these in Barkingside, Ilford, Essex (UK) around 1984 – obviously with a style like the contemporary Ford Sierra but also so very unlike any other American car I’d seen.
I had one of these, an ’86 elan model that was Midnight Wine (Thunderbird, get it? — what WERE they thinking???) with the taupe cloth interior. What a great car. It was a fairly loaded V-8 that was a great driver and pretty good on gas — 24 MPG plus was easy to achieve using the cruise control. Bought it with 80K miles, put 20K more on it in two years, and didn’t spend a dime on it except to replace the dashboard light bulbs, of all things.
I inherited an ’86 T-Bird, but it wasn’t the élan model variant. Good car. I didn’t have any trouble with it. Unfortunately, it met an accidental end in Jan. 2000 when some 8-ball pulled out directly in front of me.
It’s too bad that Ford didn’t or couldn’t get composite (replaceable bulb) headlamps approved for this T-Bird. If those headlamps were flush with the front, it would have looked even more futuristic than it did when it came out. Plus, it would have even improved its performance on the track too. The headlamps had to wait for the next generation, but the impact would have been greater back in 83.
Yes, but my parents owned a 1987 with the composite (plastic) headlamps, and they were some of the worst-performing OEM lights that I have ever seen. It looked like somebody had taped a couple of flashlights onto the front of the car.
It’s interesting that you mention that. I completely understand how futuristic this car probably seemed in 1983 compared to the boxy designs Ford was producing at the time, but I’m just a little bit too young to remember when this car came out. So my memories of this car are from later, from when I was in high school in the mid-1990s, looking at cars from the school bus window and daydreaming about what I might drive when I was old enough. I remember at that time thinking this generation of Thunderbird looked kind of dated compared to the then current models, specifically because of the sealed-beam headlamps and egg crate grille.
In a pioneering sense, yes, in a practical sense, we were probably better off. The 87s with the 9004 composite headlights have noticeably worse output than the 4 eye sealed beams. Maybe Daniel Stern will chime in (either to confirm or setting me straight lol)
There were headlight covers available for these at a time that really completed the look, and they were very popular too.
You’re absolutely right, Matt. The replaceable-bulb headlamps Ford trumpeted so loudly when they introduced them on the ’84 Lincoln Mark were utter garbage. This particular one of Ford’s “Better Ideas” had as its design priorities cheap, cheap, and cheap. This kind of headlamp, even with the least-bad bulbs fed by something better than Ford’s underspecified wiring, can only produce dim, poorly-focused, narrow beams with very little light on the road surface and very high levels of upward stray light that cause backdazzle in rain, fog, and snow. The main benefits over sealed beams were market hypability and cheaper manufacture.
It’s forgivable to wonder how such a lousy system wound up on so many expensive European cars (Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, Volvo, Saab…) as late as the late ’90s, given that much less inherently awful replaceable-bulb systems started becoming legal in the US just a couple of years after Ford’s ’83 mess. It’s probably because the Europeans have long taken pride in car lights and schadenfreude; they likely said “If the Americans are stupid enough to want this junk, fine, we’ll give it to them”.
The plastic lens durability requirements that Ford proposed and NHTSA rubberstamped were and are a pathetic joke, as a walk through any parking lot or down any street will confirm—at the 2015 DVN Workshop symposium, there was an excellent keynote presentation showing (with very robust data support) a direct link between headlamp lens haze and pedestrian deaths.
And this was not the first nor last such cost-centric Ford lighting “innovation”. It happened a few years earlier, too, with halogen sealed beams (“Hey, we can reduce the wattage and still meet the minimum legal output while specifying cheaper wiring and switches!” instead of “Hey, we can keep the wattage the same and give the driver more light!”). It happened again (’93 Lincoln Mark VIII halogen and HID headlamps) and again (’97 Lincoln Mark VIII HID and halogen headlamps) and again (’97 Lincoln Mark VIII full-width neon brake/tail light) and again (too numerous to mention).
That said, it’s worth loudly noting that European headlamps and the European car lighting standards are not necessarily or categorically superior to the US standards, contrary to popular belief.
As for those aftermarket headlamp covers: popular, yes. Also illegal and unsafe.
Great info as always! I upgraded my 94 Cougar’s wiring with high/low relays and the difference was well worth the meager investment.
I take it clear covers distort the light? I remember there being a lot of the black covers too, which seemed more dangerous, much like the nite shades fad today.
The “clear” covers were usually nowhere near optical clarity, and none of them was made of a material adequately heat- or UV- or abrasion-or chemical-resistant for front-of-car service, and none of them was hardcoated. They degraded much faster and worse than even the pathetic Ford-spec plastic headlamp lenses (polycarbonate with hardcoat).
The blackout covers, whether applied to front or rear lights, ought to be grounds for cops to pull the car over, remove the covers, and make the driver drive back and forth over them until they are so much plastic gravel—then cite the driver for littering on top of driving an unsafe vehicle.
When Ford lobbied NHTSA/DOT to adopt freeform aerodynamic headlamps, they unfortunately didn’t care beans about light beam quality and only about styling (with improved aerodynamics and thus fuel economy as stated reasons for allowing the new plastic composite lamps, since styling wouldn’t have swayed the government). Instead of adopting the actual European (ECE) standards as most of the world has done, the new lamps *looked* like European lamps but used completely different bulbs, optics, and reflectors than used elsewhere – and were markedly inferior.
The US has a long history of mandating inferior headlamps, one that continues to the present day. When quartz-halogen headlights became common in Europe by the 1960s, the US was stuck with incandescent sealed beams. Adaptive lights that aimed the direction the steering wheel was pointed were banned until decades after they were used in cars like the 1967 Citroen DS everywhere but in the US. And today, the rest of the world is starting to see LED clusters with individually aimed elements that turn on or off to provide bright lighting to the driver without glaring into oncoming drivers’ eyes, using data from steering wheel direction, front cameras and light sensors detecting oncoming cars and GPS maps showing where the road is about to turn. But they are illegal in the US because here headlamps can only have two output levels, “low beam” and “high beam”. This was the subject of an article just two weeks ago in Car and Driver: http://blog.caranddriver.com/high-tech-headlights-could-thwart-certain-types-of-crashes-if-we-could-get-them-in-the-u-s/
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That’s a meme popular among certain swaths of car enthusiasts, but it just isn’t true. There’s ample provision in both the US and the UN (“European”) standards for excellent headlamps, and there’s grossly excessive allowance in both standards for poor ones, and that’s been the case for many years. Same goes for just about every other light on the car—turn signals, brake lights, you name it. The specific nature of the badness is different for bad US lamps vs. bad UN lamps, but German Shepherd ѕhit probably smells different than Rottweiler ѕhit, too. And it works this way no matter whether we’re looking (objectively) at performance of a particular kind of lamp or looking at what lamps are required to be on the vehicle. The US doesn’t require side turn signal repeaters or amber rear turn signals, and those are both serious deficiencies that cause and worsen crashes. But the UN specs don’t require cars to have sidemarker lights and reflectors, and that’s an equally serious deficiency that causes and worsens crashes. And that’s just a small handful of examples; we can find similar benefits and drawbacks in both directions comparing US vs. UN headlamps, US vs. UN brake lights, etc.
And it’s not just a theoretical matter of what’s allowed in the standards. While there are certainly examples where the UN headlamp is objectively better than the US headlamp for the same kind of car, there are numerous examples where the UN low beams provide much less seeing distance than the US low beams. This can be iterated for any other lamp, too. So no, despite lots of handwaving and mythology, European car lights are not necessarily superior and US car lights are not necessarily inferior.
And that’s frustrating, because ADB (Adaptive Driving Beams, which is what these kinds of lamps are called) stand to bring a giant safety improvement by giving drivers about 100 feet of additional seeing distance without increasing glare over low-beam levels…when they’re fully debugged.
But there are still problems, and most of them don’t get much discussion outside specialist circles. The American popular press is full of articles bemoaning the unavailability of ADB in the North American market (“stupid ol’ NHTSA is holding us hostage with their stupid ol’ 1960s laws, they’re a bunch of poopooheads, aw gee whiz”, etc). But that’s an unfair oversimplification, and it overlooks crucial pieces of the picture.
It is easy, of course, and justifiable to express frustration at regulatory lag blocking new, better lighting technology in North America. It is much harder to bear in mind that regulators’ hands are often tied even if they eagerly want to change the regulations.
There is a great deal of very devoted, thoughtful work being done with an admirable level of genuine cooperation between industry and NHTSA, all aimed at paving the way for advanced headlighting systems in North America before too much longer. It’s frustrating to have to wait, but the wait can be seen very differently through other lenses. For example, it means North Americans are spared the high cost and teething problems of early systems. Consider the burden American drivers bore when the U.S. took a pioneering start at cutting down on auto exhaust emissions: 10 to 15 years of cars that ran poorly, gave poor fuel economy, and resisted easy and durable repairs. That was the price to pay for clean air while the technology to clean up exhaust effectively and cost-effectively was developed.
The burden was worth it, of course; the air is vastly cleaner than it was in the pre-control era despite many more people driving many more cars much longer distances. And North American drivers’ suffering through that early period lightened the load considerably for the rest of the world’s drivers. In countries who waited until an emissions cutdown was a simple matter of building cars with existing, proven, debugged technology already in wide use, it was a simple, seamless, easy changeover: one year their new cars had carburetors and ran on leaded fuel; the next year their new cars had fuel injection and catalytic converters and took unleaded. Of course, that doesn’t mean their transition was without burden—just that theirs was a different burden, of more years of more-polluted air.
The situation with adaptive driving beam is comparable. Many of the systems already on the road in Europe generally work pretty well, but they are not faultless. There are still rough edges and pointy corners to their operation, and there’s not much data on how well they avoid creating new dangers to other drivers in the course of bringing new safety to drivers of equipped cars. Nor is it clearly known how they might tend to go wrong in the long run.
NHTSA’s legal mandate is to ensure traffic safety, so those rough edges and pointy corners and data gaps need to be addressed. It will happen; it is happening in a very hope-inspiring way, it’s just not quite done yet. In 2015, NHTSA released a thoroughgoing study (available here) of ADB systems. It presents the results of NHTSA’s evaluation of existing UN (European)-spec ADB systems.
The results in the 201-page report are prodigiously detailed. Of particular interest are the findings that existing ADB systems do not dependably succeed in controlling glare to levels within existing low-beam limits, and that some ADB systems are slower to react than they ought to be. More specifically, it was found that the tested ADB systems work well on flat, straight roads, but produce more than low-beam glare at intersections, in some curved-road situations, and to motorcycles.
Meanwhile, SAE (at NHTSA’s request) devised a technical standard (J 3069) for ADB defining the system functions and performance in terms of objective, repeatable test protocols as required by the US legal and regulatory system, rather than the subjective terms of the UN regulation. The SAE Lighting Systems Group did a great job avoiding reinvention of the wheel; to the maximum possible degree the range of what’s allowable in the SAE standard aligns with the range of what’s allowable in the UN standard. So that’s an important piece of infrastructure built.
While it’s heartening to see a robust, thoughtful framework being built for ADB in North America, by contrast it’s disappointing to see the lack of interest or resources to address the shortcomings of existing static-lighting standards, so even when North American drivers get access to intelligent headlamps, we’ll probably still be stuck with yesterday’s (red) rear turn signals, for example. But it’s never helpful to let the unattainable goal of perfection get in the way of striving for the achievable goal of improvement. With patience and participation, we may very well see real improvement before too long (…or maybe not; the present administration is highly regulations-averse).
Interesting. The best lights I’ve driven behind were the 7″ round sealed beams on my old Cortina. On high beam I could see the house at the end of my street; haven’t been able to do that since. I’ve always felt the QI replaceable-bulb aero lights weren’t as good as the older technology, but thought it was just the ‘first car’ effect. Memories and all that….
A great design that redeemed Ford after the awful 1980 BoxBird. My only criticism was some parts could feel a little cheap.
Only drove one of these once, as a rental during a very windy business trip to Rochester. Sleek new body, same old wayward handling and disconnected steering.
I actually just saw a silver one of those here in Massachusetts the other day, but apart from that one they’re very uncommon in these parts.
I owned one of these ’86 aero-bird/T-Birds from November 1998 through January 11, 2000. The paint job was a lil’ faded (from the West Palm Beach, FL sun) so I ~think~ the original color was gold or copper with about the same color interior. It was my Dad’s car and when he died on Nov. 9, 1998 I inherited it. Having driven my ’64 Ford around every day since Sept. 1989 I figured I may as well take the T-Bird back out and about and keep the Falcon perched in the driveway.
I liked the Thunderbird well enough and I thought it was a good-looking car. It had those wheel covers with the 4 bolts in the center -and- the 8 ‘holes’ surrounding it. Different than the wheel covers without the ‘holes’ pictured with the car the opens this post.
Fast forward to Jan. 11, 2001. On my way back from the grocery store some old idiot pulled right out in front of me = totaled out ‘T’. I was not a happy camper. 21 staples in my head for a deep scalp laceration and and a wrecked Thunderbird. I figured my Dad would have just been glad I was able to walk away from the accident, bloody mess that I was. Still, that was depressing to have dad’s last car end up totaled out on Forest Hill Boulevard.
My father’s 1986 Thunderbird is, to date, the newest car I’ve ever owned. I would have gladly driven it around a lot longer than a year and month, but it wasn’t meant to be. That car had digital dashboard features. The speedometer was digital and so was the number of miles the car had been driven. I’ve seen an ’87 T-Bird in the past year, but that’s it for bird sightings from from that era around my locality.
The accident was January 11, 2000, not 2001. I do like to be as accurate as I can when typing out a post.
MAY AS WELL BE overly dramatic, too! Ergo: A trip back from Publix turns nightmare! Gag me with a steering wheel!
’80s T-Birds are getting hard to find in general, but the *really* nearly-extinct items must be the metric-diameter TRX wheels that were optional on them (and many other Fox platform cars), due to replacement tires being rare and very expensive. Nearly all of them that are still out there have been switched to conventionally-sized wheels.
The early Aero Birds didn’t have a carryover dashboard from the ’80-’82 models; the ’83 got a redesign that had a similar shape as used previously but with much softer contours, a built-up vinyl area in the lower kneepad area, and the deletion of the thin horizontal black strip atop the dash just below the windshield that housed warning lamps (which were relocated to above the center stack). The ’83-’84 T-Bird dash actually bore a closer resemblance to the ’82-’87 Lincoln Continental dash, though they weren’t identical either. The ’83-’86 Fox LTD did reuse the ’80-’82 Thunderbird dashboard though.
I have a 1986 Aerobird. Base model, 3.8L V6. Power windows, locks, mirrors, and driver seat. Also has air conditioning. The factory tape deck still works, and yes, I still use it!
Best part? It only has 38,000 miles. My 90 year old grandmother gave it to me after sitting for three years. After about $1,000 of maintenance and a month straight of fixing it up, she’s back on the road. Most of these birds were destroyed during the Cash for Clunkers program. I know of one other one in my area that has been rotting away in a driveway for years. I can honestly say when I drive mine around, I don’t see any other one’s on the road. Sure, it’s only a Fox-Body bird, but it was my grandmother’s. You can’t put a price on sentimental value.
Here’s a photo of it at my office.
I am curious about your statement that Cash for Clunkers took these off the road. My 1993 Crown Victoria would not qualify for a C4C buyback because it got 1 mpg higher on the EPA ratings than the C4C threshold. Did a V6 powered aerobird (which almost all of them were then) really get worse mileage than a 93 CV?
From the factory, my T-Bird was rated at 15 mpg city, 23 mpg highway. I think the Crown Vic would get around 25 mpg on the highway. I had a ’92 that I think was rated at 18 mpg city, 25 mpg highway. I have seen videos online of “aerobirds” having their engines blown up for the cash for clunkers program. There may have been an age requirement of the vehicle as well to qualify, but I could be wrong.
I remember that C4C used “revised” EPA figures and so I could see where different powertrains might make a marginal difference. Perhaps those with the 3 speed auto got under the line?
Quite possible. I do have a C5 trans in mine (even though the engine begs for a 4th/OD gear). But as mentioned, I don’t see any Aerobirds in my area anymore, except the one that is rusty away in a nearby driveway. I don’t even see BoxBirds anymore.