We have caught some rare and interesting things through the car windows of our many skilled car-spotting correspondents. But how about this: an early Windstar. Not just any early Windstar, but one that is without any visible rust – a rare occurrence here in central Indiana, let me assure you.
I have been meaning to give the Windstar a good shredding a full length CC treatment, but have not gotten that job done yet.
The Windstar was known mainly for three things: its appetite for head gaskets, its appetite for transmissions and its unparalleled ability to rust more quickly than any other minivan ever made, with the possible exception of its older brother the the Aerostar. It was also notable for its debut as a 3 door minivan a single year before Chrysler gave us that all-important 4th door. Oops.
At first I thought this was one of the rare 1997 models (based on a color that was not available in 1995-96). Rare because the Windstar’s 1997 model year only ran from October, 1996 to January, 1997. In looking over this picture, however, I believe that this is the extended “King Door” that Ford gave us in January, 1997 (as a 1998 model) which had to hold Ford minivan buyers until a true 4 door van was introduced in the summer of 1998 as an early 1999 model. Who here really knew that the Windstar did not have a single standard-length model-year in 1997, 1998 or 1999? Such was the importance of getting driver’s side access to the rear seat. OK, the King Door may not have accommodated any passenger older than nine, but you do what you can, right?
A Windstar that has either not eaten its head gaskets and transmission and has not rusted itself into the salvage yard or is owned by someone who has been willing to pour money into body and mechanical repairs faster than the Windstar can consume it: How unusual. Either way this is one of those rare situations where even a first-class automotive turd like the early Windstar can be lovingly maintained and kept on the road. I don’t know about you but I intend to savor it – because I’m betting none of us is going to see another like it any time soon.
Further reading in case you simply must read more about the early Windstar before I get around to writing more on the topic:
And even looking pristine like that there could be hidden shock tower rust in the rear about to consume the “king.”
I had not intended the timing this way, but this Windstar could almost be considered the perfect opposite of the 66 Valiant from this morning. Where the Valiant might have been the perfect “rest of someone’s life” car, I cannot imagine a worse one than an early Windstar. I saw the old white-haired man driving it and felt sorry for him. How much more pleasant his life would probably have been with a Grand Voyager.
Uncle Tim (Dad’s Brother) bought one of the early Windstars when he felt his growing family necessitated it. Interestingly he relegated his early build W-body Cutlass sedan to 2nd car duty when he bought the Windstar.
That Windstar was such a giant POS I was amazed when he bought a Flex a few years ago.
I vividly remember being on the fence between a new 95 Windstar and a 1 year old 94 Club Wagon. The Grand Caravan seemed a little stale and I recall thinking “Wow, Ford has finally built a first-class minivan!” Boy oh boy am I ever glad I went with the used E series. Major bullet dodged. I knew several people who bought first or second year Windstars and I have yet to hear one fondly remembered. My only outlier is a guy I know who has driven two of the later 4 door models to really high miles. He got the second one from his father when his father stopped driving. It came from Wisconsin. I do not understand how it remains in one piece but my friend keeps driving it.
Sitting out in the parking lot here at work as I write this is a winter/beater Aerostar… does that count? (c:
I have not been so surprised at the condition of a minivan since I found the rust-free Aerostar I wrote up here several years ago. I wish I had found this one parked because I would have been out of the car taking pictures in a heartbeat.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classic-1995-ford-aerostar-how-hard-can-it-be-to-make-a-minivan-part-2/
Nice find, never heard of the King door despite being a former Windstar owner. With the plastic hubcaps could this be a GL trim with the 3.0 V6? That might explain the longevity.
Speaking of rust, did you order some Krown goo for your Honda?
Don’t forget my Windstar COAL here:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1996-ford-windstar-anomaly%E2%80%8F/
Thanks for the reminder, I added a link to your COAL.
I have not yet on the Krown. I just finished sealing that body seam leak that everyone told me I was going to get and then had to swap cars with my daughter to find a leak that put an inch of water into the spare tire well of her Civic. Oh well, it beats fixing head gaskets. 🙂
Also, as near as I can tell there was a base model below the GL called the 3.0 which seems to have been named by the standard 3.0 engine. A really close look at my original full sized photo IDs this one as a GL which seems to have used the 3.8 as the standard engine.
GL’s had Vulcan as base motor, the LX and up had the 3.8 head gasket eater. The stripped 3.0L model was similar to the Taurus G, a price leader for ‘bait and switch’.
I have found a reference (automobile-catalog.com) that indicates a midyear 3.8 engine in the GL. It is unclear if the 3.8 replaced the 3.0 as the base engine or if the change just made it possible to get either engine in the GL trim. I can see Ford trying to juice the content of the GL in an effort to get some sales improvement.
The 3.8 V-6 and automatic transmissions Ford used in the Windstar and Taurus/Sable probably sold as many Hondas and Toyotas as the front-wheel-drive GM X-cars.
Lance Stephenson of the Indiana Pacers basketball team has long been described as being either Good Lance or Bad Lance, and you never know from game to game which one will show up to play. I think Ford showrooms were like this in the 80s and 90s. There was Good Ford (like the Panther and the F series) and Bad Ford (like the Windstar) and until a model had been out for a few years you didn’t know which one you were getting. I don’t think any other company had the capacity to design and build certain models so well and others so terribly, all at the same time.
The frustrating part was that often the less expensive models (Escort and Tempo) were better than their pricier brethren (Taurus and Windstar) from a reliability standpoint.
Good Ford and Bad Ford can be pretty finely sliced, too. 3.0 vs 3.8 Taurus in the 80s/90s, manual vs Powershift Focus more recently.
It’s still not quite as random as the Mopar Quality Lottery, though.
Our family had a bronze ’98 with the third door, a GL with the 3.8L. Smart buyers got the 3.8 with the goodies like rear air, etc. without the gingerbread of the LX or Limited.
But the really smart ones got a 4-door Mopar.
There is a Windstar lurking in the driveway of a house in my neighborhood. It’s toward the back, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it move, but it exists. I’m assuming it’s got a not insignificant amount of lurking rust even though we don’t use copious amounts of salt here.
A friend had one of these back in the early 2000’s I think it was a ’98 model. He had nothing but problems with it including tranny issues. He traded it for a VW Jetta – out of the frying pan into the fire because it was nothing but trouble too!
The 3.8 v6 had the head gasket issues. Not the base 3.0 Vulcan motors. Sister and her hubby had a base 1996 3.0 for 10 years, no major issues. Too bad Vulcan couldn’t have been upgraded for more power.
But still, Ford “phoned these in”. [And I’m a Ford fan]. The thinking* behind not offering a driver’s side slider was “can’t let kids out on traffic side”. But, most of them were parked in suburban Mall diagonal parking slots, and not parallel parking in cities.
*The “thinkers” were just making an excuse besides ‘cost cutting’.
GM and Ford were like “not invented here” with minivans, and when the RWD Astro and Aerostar didn’t “knock Chryslers out”, they whipped up their FWD versions with no regard for quality. And look who is still around?
One of Mopar’s “Greatest Hits” versus GM/Ford “deadly sin”
Relatively speaking it hadn’t been that long since Ford tried passenger doors on the driver’s side of their original “minivan” the Falcon Station Bus. They just didn’t sell and thus were dropped pretty quickly.
It was the designers at International that first proposed the sliding driver’s side passenger door for their proposed mini-van version of the Scout. With the talks of using Chrysler power plants and/or selling the Scout business unit to Chrysler some of the Scout engineers and designers ended up getting in good with the Chrysler people. When the Scout Business unit was closed many of those same engineers found new jobs at Chrysler. They brought the concept of the minivan with them and if they didn’t sneak out with some drawings they certainly had a good recollection of their work and replicated it. While it would take several years before the driver’s side door made it to market the styling of the front end was pretty much a replica of the one used on the standard version styling buck. https://jalopnik.com/have-a-look-at-the-1980s-international-scout-that-never-1758491270
You make a very good point on doors being designed for city use when these were aimed at suburban markets. It is funny how the companies miss the obvious way consumers will use an object on so many important things. By the time these came out, the old way of thinking that children and doors do not safely mix had died, overcome by practicality of loading said kids into a large vehicle. Yes, it was cheaper to have no passenger door on the driver’s side, but to “fix” it with a slightly larger door was probably as much cost for that fix as adding another real door.
I thought it had to do more with the structural rigidity problems dual sliding doors created.
GM spent something like a billion dollars developing the U-bodies. It wasn’t a lack of investment that failed them.
I actually kind of like the ‘king door’ concept, even if it does have limited appeal. No, it wouldn’t work for families, but what about use as rear access in a cargo van capacity? The driver could store frequently used tools or items behind the driver’s seat and, rather than having to open up a sliding door, simply open the driver’s door and reach behind the seat.
It’s probably a stretch and, as I said, would only apply to cargo vans.
It worked just fine for family use as we had one when the kids were small. When it was just me and the kids they kids always went through the king door. It wasn’t bad to strap the younger one in her seat behind the driver’s seat while the older child strapped himself in.
It is not really fair to ding Ford and GM about the lack of a driver’s side rear door on the Windstar, Aerostar, Astro/Safari and first generation U Vans. After all Chrysler did not have a 4 door mini van until 1996 MY and only unveiled the new van at the North American International Auto Show a full year after the Windstar arrived. I am sure Chrysler kept the new van and its 4 doors under tight wrap until that show debut.
You cannot fault Toyota, GM, Ford for all using the same time tested sliding/opening door on the right style that almost all vans used for decades. This was also the same thing that Chrysler did with the 1st and 2nd minivans.
I also thing Chrysler was not really sure a 4 door van would be a big success as they made a 3 door version of the van for the first few years of the 3rd generation vans to hedge their bets. It takes time to retool the production line to make a van with 3 doors and then a van with 4 doors. It is cheaper and more time efficient to make all the vans 4 doors.
I think Chrysler took a chance with 4 doors on a mini van and reaped the rewards. It was a classic case of nobody really needing an item but once they used it then they wondered how they could live without it.
Most folks that I knew that had minivans with 3 doors (1st and 2nd gen Caravans and Windstars) never complained about the lack of a drivers side rear door.
However once they got a van with 4 doors, it was like how did they ever go without one before
So Chrysler created a market for the 4 door van.
However looking back it should have been Ford that came up with the concept first. After all they were partners with Nissan and Nissan did have the Stanza Wagon with 2 sliding rear doors
The king door was a compromise, championed by a certain short, Scottish Ford VP with a Napoleon complex. The addition of a driver side slider door required a relocation of the auxiliary climate system and major body shop retooling. But that king door was heavy and hard to manage in a tight parking lot. It also required a long reach to grab the seat belt to buckle up.
The engine and transmission issues were the result of the added strain from a heavier-than-Taurus mass in this not-so-minivan. Chrysler and Honda had “car parts” problem with their minivans, too (brakes and transmissions, respectively)… but they stuck with it and re-invested for better iterations.
The Windstar’s “brother from another mother”, the Mercury Villager (which was really a Nissan Quest, although built in the US) is still a common sight around these parts.
I always found it odd that FoMoCo didn’t just re-badge a Windstar for Mercury dealers.
Too bad Ford didn’t just rebadge the Quest for Ford dealers, too, would have saved a lot of good will.
The construction/blue coller tradesfolk love these Nissan powered “cockroach” minivans. A few times have seen a well worn Nautica Villager, with ladders strapped on top, doing down and dirty work.
They eventually did it with the Freestar’s Mercury Monterey twin.
I remember when Windstars first came out they were highly regarded in the press. Ford had the right idea, they just completely flubbed the mechanicals. But they weren’t the only ones. Every minivan manufacturer back then had a poor track record of some sort, largely from using car components in vehicles that weighed and hauled as much as a truck and from not understanding what the public wanted.
That’s a great point about standard-issue car components not being up to use in a heavier minivan. I pity the engineers who undoubtedly tried to explain it to the bean-counters but were overridden, leaving minivans to get a poorly built reputation as the car components failed much more readily than if they had been used as originally intended.
In fact, maybe this played a big role in Ford and GM initially going with truck-based Aerostar and Astro minivans. Maybe they figured the Chrysler products would quickly go away once they started falling apart. Unfortunately, although they had their issues, too, the Mopars were never bad enough to seriously dent their sales.
Very great find! I still laugh at that door to this day haha. Taking a play out of AMC’s book with the Pacer.
Shades of a first gen Mini Clubman. Was the King door only on the driver’s (not curbside) side of the van?
Yep, driver’s side only.
If you are now scratching your head over that, you wouldn’t be the first!
I’m guessing it was much cheaper to just enlarge the drivers door than to enlarge the passengers and move the sliding door back.
Yes, the King Door was only on the drivers side. The passenger side was the original length front and side doors.
I worked for a buddy who ran a small accounting business in the mid eighties. He had a pair of wagons,an Aspen and volare as he had a young family.
He got a good office job which supplied him with a new company car every couple years. He went through a series of aerostars and windstars then started with explorers which he has driven til the present day.
Although he always could buy the cars out when they were replaced he never did until a few years ago with the explorer.
His wife had Chrysler’s and then some Nissans. He was very much an it’s all about the numbers guy and I think that says a lot about the quality of Ford’s during the aerostar/winstar period.
I remember the Oakville Ford plant proudly displaying a big (yuuuge) sign that they made the Windstar at that factory. The kept it there till it was succeeded by a new sign announcing the Freestar. Some time after it was quietly removed.
My buddy had a Windstar until it was written off in a small fender bender (the sliding door mechanism had to have been replaced but parts were no longer available). Had lots of problems with it but the body held up nicely. He happily took his cheque and got a Kia Rio. When the wife needed a car, then a Kia Sedona. Then this former Ford-loyal man got himself a Ram 1500.
It said Home of the Windstar, I can’t remember what it said during the Freestar years– It now just has The Ford Oval and Lincoln emblem–they produce the Edge and Flex and what ever the Lincoln equivalants are.
My Aunt drove down to visit her sister a number of years ago, and tagged along when her sister took her Winstar in for service. The two of them must have started talking about the many ills the Winstar suffered from, because, when she returned to Kalamazoo, my Aunt mentioned that Windstar to me, and commented “the only thing they haven’t had repaired on that van is the exhaust system”.
Cracking open my copy of Consumer Reports, I found exactly one system in the Winstar that had consistently proven to be durable.
Steve, remember our bet about the new Focus’ platform? Looks like you owe me. 🙂
http://www.autonews.com/article/20180416/OEM04/180419836/holy-grail-platform-coming-into-focus
Steve, remember our bet about the new Focus’ platform? Looks like you owe me. ?
It isn’t over until the next gen Mazda3 comes out and everyone gets a look underneath to see if Mazda’s new “modular” platform is the same thing with a different name. And if I’m wrong, you will still need to provide your own transportation to Motown to collect the tour of the Packard plant.
http://shop.puredetroit.com/PACKARD-PLANT-TOURS_ep_48-1.html
Mazda is “divorced” from Ford, and is now partnered with Toyota.
Toyota Yaris sedan is a Mazda 2, for example.
Also, the 2 Japanese makers are building a new joint assembly plant in Alabama. It will build Corollas with Mazda CUV’s.
So, don’t expect any Mazda 3’s or CUV’s using Ford compact vehicle platforms in foreseeable future.
Mazda is “divorced” from Ford, and is now partnered with Toyota.
As Paul and I discussed a while back, Toyota did not buy into Mazda until last August. Any deal to share platform with Ford for the Focus and Mazda3 would have predated that, just as Mazda’s deal to stick a different front clip and a Fiat engine in a Miata and call it a Fiat 124, predates the deal with Toyota.
We had a 98 with the 3.8L. We used that van hard as a family of four with 2 growing boys. My wife drove it daily, and on the weekends it hauled the family to scouts, little league, etc. Even pulled a small pop up camper with two tandem kayaks on the roof rack.
The only problem in 120,000 miles was the sliding door switch would get gummed up and I had to clean it with contact cleaner every few months.
Sold it and bought an 02 Mountaineer. Now that was a real POS.
In 1997 my wife and I were researching a minivan purchase. She came up with a great idea to rent the model we were most seriously considering to buy and take it on a planned road trip vs. our own vehicle. So we rented a 1997 Windstar…yes the one sans king door. I’m tall so one criteria that the van had to pass muster on was that the driver’s side was a comfortable ride on a long trip, with plenty of leg room. The ’97 did not disappoint, so we felt confident our ’98 purchase would be fine.
Little did we know about the king door modification for the ’98 model year. I did not notice the diminished leg room this door mod caused until our first road trip. My wife looked over at me after a few hours on the road and said “You don’t look comfortable”. I replied “I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before now, but you’re right. I feel cramped.” She did some subsequent research and discovered that the king door mod forced the driver’s seat to be permanently moved forward to allow rear set egress through the king door. Bummer.
Fortunately it was primarily my wife’s vehicle, but she wanted to trade it after awhile because my own vehicle was a Ford F150 and was not good for road trips beyond just me driving it. We traded the Windstar in on an Expedition, which was a GREAT road car. Very comfortable. I will give the Windstar credit in that it never developed any major trouble in our few years of ownership, but the “door wars” debacle of Ford getting caught with their pants down while Chrysler led the parade overall soured our experience with the van.
On the other hand my brother bought a ’99 Windstar complete with sliding doors on both sides and drove it to hell and back, and that sucker kept going and going, 3.8 liter engine and all. It even got stolen, later recovered, and could still be driven!
And…who would steal a Windstar?? I guess there’s no such thing as a theft proof car.
I was suprised to see a second gen windstar at work recently with intact rocker panels until I noticed the Florida plate.
We bought one of those ‘97 Windstars in 11/96 and it was on the way to eating the head gasket – with the wild fluctuations of the temp gauge – before trading it in for a new ‘01 Highlander. It was a great minivan up until then, had around 106k miles when scuttled.
I drove one as a taxi for a friend who owned it on weekends. It had a great heater. And the leather seats were comfortable. It was that wierd chartuse green color. It was fancier than han any if the many Mopar vans she ever had. That was the good.
The bad it had issues. The doors would try to close on people or open randomly. The mechanism for the power doors was not robust. The hubs went bad, as did the rack, the transmission,the manifold butterfly things broke, the AC failed, the abs would sometimes very randomly try to stop the car with no driver input. It got poor gas mileage. It had ok power but was not smooth if you accellerated fast. It would hold the gears too long. Surprisingly the head gaskets never failed. It was not a vehicle I liked driving. It just seemed off and like it was on the brink of failure. I hate minivans but if I had to pick one I would get a Mopar inspite of their many issues with transmissions at least the 3.3 and the 3,8 Chrysler held up as did the smoky Mitsubishi 3.0 engines.
Since late posting seems much more common here than at most sites (I like) I thought I’d chip in. My father used to get a new company car every two years, and he always chose a stogy four door GMC product. Except for the time he decided, I don’t know why, to get a bright red two door AMC Matador Coupe. It seemed exotic and racy to us kids, but he quickly regretted it and it was back to Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles after that. He must have had a generous milage allowance, because his territory covered all of Vancouver Island, and in summer we often drove to California and Idaho to see family. When the Aerostar came out he decided to give it a try. His next car was also an Aerostar, and then the company he worked for restructured. He had to go into business for himself, doing basically the same job but now on a contract basis. That meant no expense account and no company car. He bought the Aerostar, and if he wanted a new car or it needed repairs that was now on him. I know this sounds like a set up, but its not. He had to keep them longer than two years, but he never had any serious problems with them, and he always bought another one. I’m pretty sure they were purchased too, and not leased. I don’t recall the rational behind this decision, but given how many miles he put on them, maybe he just couldn’t get a lease on favourable terms. They also served as family vehicles, and when we started driving my sister and I were allowed to use them as well. Unbelievably looking back on it, that even included letting me take them on the Island’s extensive network of logging roads for hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. I also used them to tow an MGB on more than one occasion. I think there were five different vans altogether, but I can only remember four specifically, so maybe not. My favourite was a long wheelbase model in a lovely metallic dark green with AWD. There was also a very attractive short wheelbase van with a dark red metallic finish. My least favourite was a tedious silver/grey colour with a tacky stripe package; although the digital dash and power everything seemed cool at the time. They all had a different combination of options, and most had a 3l motor. The green AWD van had a 4l motor, and there may have been others with the bigger motor and/or AWD as well. They all drove pretty much the same, rather truck-like but comfortable nonetheless. I seem to recall the odd minor bit of trim coming loose, and the latch broke on a back window once. My father was meticulous about maintainance, and despite the miles of sometimes hard use by a family with more than one dog, they always looked good inside and out when he traded them in. I never saw any rust or torn fabric, and I washed and vacuumed them out many times. With the random options and high milage you’d think at least one of them would have been a problem, but there was only a single occasion when he had to rent a car because the Aerostar was out of action. The problem? Believe it or not, it was stolen! It was eventually recovered, but the theives had been living in it and the interior was beyond redemption, so that was it for that one. He got the first one the first year they came out, and by the time he retired and sold the last one they were no longer being made. However atypical, our experience with the Aerostar was nothing but positive. The only other Ford any of us ever owned was my second generation Escort wagon in that same metalic green colour. I got it with just over 200000km on it and scrapped it through a government program several years later when it was pushing 300000km. Never had to do anything to it but feed it gas and change the oil. I got rid of it because the rear suspension was begining to fail and it would have cost too much to fix it. It was a known problem with that model and I guess I was fortunate it lasted as long as it did. The transmission had also developed some quirks that could be avoided with the proper driving technique, but despite the excellent condition of the interior and a body free of rust keeping it just didn’t make sense. I’m sure the government program I scrapped it under doesn’t make sense either, except maybe to the auto industry, but I got some cash and a car share membership out of it so it certainly made sense for me. Still, I was sad to see it go.