Do ALL car manufacturar's sell all there new cars?, Do we have any ford Sierra's left, Escort's, Cavalier, or other brands?
Is there any they can't sell and if so were do they go auction?
Would you buy a brand new old stock 1990's car?
Im sure i read somewhere think it was Rover who had some new old stock motors to shift.
Like i said a silly question or is it............
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alfa_Romeo_SZ.JPG
Could be tempted by one of these I guess if the piggy bank was getting a bit too full.......
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I want the mint, 20-something thousand mile Astra GTE 16v at the Vauxhall Heritage Centre. Badly. :-)
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>> I want the mint, 20-something thousand mile Astra GTE 16v at the Vauxhall Heritage Centre.
>> Badly. :-)
Its nice but I want the silver Vauxhall Viscount that they have on display, that looks fantastic.
Last edited by: Redviper on Mon 28 Jun 10 at 00:11
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A neighbour of mine drives a 2000 V reg rusty Escort MK5. They were discontinued in 1995! It has the awful CVH engine in it.
My dads car was made in March 1996 but wasn't registered until December 1997 because it is a very odd spec. Who wanted a push rod engined car with electric seats in the late 90's?
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>> it is a very odd spec. Who wanted a push rod engined car with electric
>> seats in the late 90's?
That was Ford all over until the Mondeo ushered in a fresh approach to their new product design. Before that, it was primitive technology hidden under toys and modern styling. The Mondeo was the opposite - a cracking car hidden under a body so bland you'd lose it in a car park. But selling Fords when the Mondeo was launched, I used to love driving them. There was a rightness to that car which had eluded Ford for years. I took a humble 1.8 GLX home one weekend, and put about 1,000 miles on it. It was smooth, lively, quiet, well specced, comfortable, handled and steered like no cooking model Ford had ever done before, and felt like it was built to last 200,000 miles + (which it later proved to be)
Yet its predecessor, the Sierra was a totally different beast. I remember this car was marketed on its futuristic design, and the (then) staggering computing capabilities of their EEC IV engine management system on the 2.0 engine. The fact that said engine dated back to the 1960's, and the fact that all the underpinnings except the rear suspension were lifted straight from the ancient Cortina were strangely kept quiet.
Ford's biggest problem was hanging on to some horrible, ancient engines until well past their sell by date. The old pushrod 1.3 worked well in the Ka, and the car was so cheap it didn't really matter, but I agree using the horrible CVH (Constant Vibration and Harshness), and pushrod 1.1/1.3 in more expensive models in the 90's was unforgiveable, when rivals were all streets ahead.
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>> There was a rightness to that car which had eluded Ford for years.
>>
Didn't Jackie Stewart have some input to the design at a late stage?
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>> Didn't Jackie Stewart have some input to the design at a late stage?
Yes, he was a chassis consultant, and test driver, IIRC.
I also heard a story that Richard Parry-Jones moved to Ford Europe when the Mondeo was about half way through its development cycle. He drove the prototype, went back to the design team and basically told them to scrap it and start again as it was nowhere near good enough. The car as we came to know it was developed under his stewardship, and with Jackie Stewart's input.
Parry-Jones went on to oversee development of the Fiesta mkIV, Puma and Focus, all of which were widely regarded as dynamic class leaders. A hell of an engineer.
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>> They were discontinued in 1995
Are you sure it's a MkV? The basic bodyshell shape was the same from 1990 until "the last one rolled off the Halewood assembly line in July 2000"(Wikipedia), only the grille and lights were different:
bit.ly/anA2Is
Escort production overlapped with Focus production by about 2 years. There are certainly some X- and Y- registered Escorts around here, as well as my R- reg example - the first Focii were S- registered.
Going back to the original topic, I reckon the practice of registering vehicles a year or more after they went out of production has always gone on. There's a cab firm in Leicester running 51-plate Mk2 Mondeos (first Mk3s were X- reg), and I can clearly recall the BBC 3 Counties radio car in the 80s was an 84/B reg Cortina estate (when the Sierra took over with Y- suffix plates).
Last edited by: Dave_TD {P} on Mon 28 Jun 10 at 11:22
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Back in 1994 I was offered an unregistered delivery mileage VW Golf GTI by a VW dealer in Cheshire. The car had been built in 1989 and had never been sold.
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You can walk into your local Skoda dealer ship and order an Octavia mk1 (~ Golf mk4) today, brand spanking new. Replaced by the mk2 in this market ~2004.
Seen a couple recently on 58 plates (both working as taxis)!
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Ford do not build cars unless they have an order for them-so any unsold cars would not be with them but with dealers.
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Ford brought out a new model Escort at 95.5 MY.Different body(slightly-did away with oval grille) and changed the rear suspension from IRS to a trailing beam.
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We sold our last Sierra about a year after the Mondeo was launched. A brand new, unregistered 1.6 "Azura" (poverty spec in a nice metallic blue with a body kit) (eventually registered on an L plate), for about £7k IIRC. A new base spec Mondeo at the time was about £12k.
I still see that car about in Oxford occasionally as well, and it still looks tidy.
Re jc2's point, we ended up with some weird and wonderful stuff which customers had cancelled. Such bizarre "personal" specs that they were virtually unsaleable.
Best example. A Mondeo 2.0 Ghia estate auto with RS dress up kit (bodykit to you and me) in Citrine Yellow. You know those yellow Stabilo Boss highlighters....... Sat in the compound for about 18 months, and was virtually given away in the end.
Last edited by: DP on Mon 28 Jun 10 at 12:21
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The guy who dealt with the spares in the Velocette LE Club used to turn up in a mint, M reg Maestro...I think that was a left over car. He came from Birmingham so he may have had some connection with the trade.
I don't know when the last ones hit the dealers and as far as I know, he's still got it !
Tedt
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A local to me ex Rover dealer used to have a lot of unregistered stock. They now hold a Citroen franchise and while a colleague was in there he got chatting to the service manager who was showing him all the cars they had out back - some end of run 75 / ZT's and some older models to - unregistered. Also some old classic stuff in there to, but as smallish family owned garage who are in the business because they like cars they are not under the cash presures to move them on. That was only about 18 months ago so I suspect that some if not all are still there now.
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When I bought my Citroen ZX Aura Turbo Diesel, it was a P Reg, with 10 miles on the clock - but 18 months old IIRC.
The garage had a few of them and the story I was told was that they had been lying forgotten about in a compound somewhere.
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Dave I know my Fords (all the dates etc) as I am a bit of a Ford fanatic and have been since about 1990. The first car to ever excite me wasn't a Ferrari, it was the 1993 Mondeo which I first saw in Quicks of Old Trafford in May 1993.
The V reg Escort I am talking is this shape
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/1994_Ford_Escort.JPG
My dad had one of these, a 1995 N reg which is the design after the one above.
www.reverendlinux.com/images/Hilda.jpg
It was a great little car, rubbish round corners but the ride was decent, it sounded silent (even at 90,000 miles you could not hear the engine at tick over)
This is my dads current dashboard, still looks quite fresh considering its age
s167.photobucket.com/albums/u141/amazingtrade/?action=view¤t=inside-1.jpg
Its actually quite nice to drive though, its the same engine as the Ka, the Endura which the man in the hat hates so much but the car had a list price of £11k back in 1996 its no wonder it was on the shelf for so long. What made it worse is Ford fitted alloys to it, so it looks like the 1.4 Zetec 16v engine should be fitted to it, not the old Anglia engine.
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Edit just a bit about the 1990-2000 Escort.
The 1990-1993 models were awful with heavy steering and the awful CVH and Kent engines. In 1993 the Zetec 16v engines were introduced and the rear suspension was improved a lot at this point. The grill was changed too. They look the same but are very different to the original 1990 ones. The steering was also sorted.
In 1995 the new 95 model was a big improvement too, it was a very comfortable car and it used the same old engines but the Escort was finally a decent car. This model was killed off in about 2001 when the Merseyside factory turned into a Jaguar one.
One of the biggest problems this Escort suffered from as appalling results in crash tests.
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the mk4 and mk5 escort were abysmal things
i would go further though and say the mk4 was extremely well built ,tough in fact
the 1300 engine was ok in them
the 1400 cvh was useless unless you disconected the lambda to make it run rich to sell it then reconnect on collection
mk5 drivers seat made of chocolate
horrible things
never got on with them,packed up trying to sell them when i had one for a full year and absolutely no customer interest
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Cheap though, my dad paid £1600 for his 6 year old MK6/7 1995 1.6 LX. It had 60,000 miles and FSH. The only expense really was the cambelt which cost about £160.
In later life the engine did start to get complex issues though and at 96,000 miles it was sold on for spares as it needed to much doing for the MOT yet alone trying to get it through the emissions.
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>> the 1400 cvh was useless unless you disconected the lambda to make it run rich
>> to sell it then reconnect on collection
Ooooh, yes I remember. The worst possible combination of a rough, noisy engine that won't rev, placed in a bodyshell too heavy for it. I too thought the 1.3 did a better job.
I actually though the Escort with a Zetec under the bonnet was a perfectly respectable family car.
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I had one of those escorts.
Brought with 14k on the clock.
I had to get rid of it at 96k miles as the big ends were knocking (yet it had been serviced on time every time).
Horrible cars.
Maybe that experience has put me off Ford cars for life !
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What engine was it though? 96K is not that bad, there are plenty of engines which go pop at 20k :).
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It was a 1.6L LX escort.
The engine always sounded course and the quoted 0 - 60 time of 12 seconds (if memory serves) was a joke. It never felt that quick.
Yet nothing wrong with the engine until the big ends started knocking.
I guess those engines were never designed to last.
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I reckon they're all sold one way and another but I recall some Maestro kits coming back from Iran (I think it was) years after they'd stopped making them. Someone bought them, assembled them and sold them as new, which I guess they sort of were, but at VERY low prices.
Then there was the Isuzu Piazza, sold for peanuts when the importer went bust.
There'll be the odd one or two lying around, cos there's some funny folk, but mostly they represent money and get sold. Even if you sell at a loss it's more money than leaving it eating space in the back of your garage.
JH
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>> I reckon they're all sold one way and another but I recall some Maestro kits
>> coming back from Iran (I think it was) years after they'd stopped making them. Someone
>> bought them, assembled them and sold them as new, which I guess they sort of
>> were, but at VERY low prices.
Ledbury and Apple Maestros
More detail here www.maestro.org.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=93772#post93772
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Silly question time............................... - Runfer D'Hills
