Guilty Pleasures – The Ford Scorpio
February 2, 2020
1994 was one of the most important years of the 20th century, culturally-speaking, for two key reasons: firstly, a feel-good sitcom pilot by the name of Insomnia Café was green-lit by NBC under the new title Friends, and secondly Green Day released their first record on a major label, Dookie. Both of these vital cultural touch-points still stand up as vibrant and important works in 2020; 1994 was a great year on the whole for people who couldn’t be bothered to go out (we saw the debut of The Day Today, The Vicar of Dibley and The Fast Show, along with The Offspring’s Smash and Terrorvision’s How to Make Friends and Influence People), but it’s Friends and Dookie that really captured the zeitgeist. We wanted to have a good time, and we wanted to do it in a slightly counter-culture way.
Ford of Europe was evidently paying attention to all this. How else could we explain the Scorpio? Weird, comfy, a deliberately odd thing with a strange face; even when it ultimately turned itself into a basket case it’d still be there for you. I unashamedly love the Ford Scorpio. I’m not at all reticent to admit that. I know it’s not a popular opinion, but who wants to trust popular opinion? The Vauxhall Corsa is very popular. So is the Nissan Qashqai. That doesn’t mean I want to have anything to do with them.
It’s the second-generation Scorpio I’m talking about, the one that arrived in the halcyon and sepia-tinted majesty of 1994 and sailed on through to ’98, ditching the old Granada name and trailblazing its unique path through the motoring jungle with its zodiac-mindwarp badging and its surprised face that looked like it had just been rear-ended by a forklift. Its predecessor, the original 1980s Granada Scorpio, was essentially a big Sierra, stretching out the jellymould’s chassis a bit and fitting a body that looked like the popular hatchback had been photocopied at 120%. But the new-for-’94 model? That didn’t look like a big Sierra at all. When the covers were thrown back at the Paris Motor Show, the assembled press and public were treated to a super-modern vision of Americanised styling – the sumptuous mix of slab sides and endless curves, the sleek single strip making up the full-width rear lights, the relentless chrome. This was the type of car we’d seen swanking about in the background in Baywatch and Melrose Place, and here it was ready for its own showrooms. How exciting was that?!
OK, so a lot of people suggested that it looked more than a little like a startled frog. But people are cruel. And yes, those slinky curves did mask the fact that the same old chassis was still lurking under the skin, and all the old engines were carried over, but technological innovation and B-road agility were never the point of the Scorpio. This car was all about the swank, offering executives a world of plushness to present a genuine alternative to those ubiquitous German rivals.
Inside the Scorpio, you got a set of cosy armchairs which cuddled and swaddled you like a DFS daydream, along with a whole world of buttons to fiddle with, most of which almost always actually did something. All of the windows were powered by electricity, as were the seats if you plumped for the boss-level Ultima spec. There was a CD changer and cruise control, air-con, an electric sunroof, one of those clever heated windscreens that Ford fitted to everything in the nineties, plus all the things you needed to stop you having a really bad time, like airbags, ABS and traction control. This was exciting stuff at the dawn of the Friends era. And in a fabulous act of subversion, Ford opted to can the entire notion of badging one-upmanship which had characterised every model that had gone before it, by opting never to advertise on the bootlid what engine or trim option the buyer had chosen. In times gone by, the car park kudos of slotting your GXL next to a lowly L was all-important, but this was the go-go nineties – there was nothing so gauche as boot badges here… if you wanted to know whether your neighbour had taken the plunge on a base-spec, Ghia or full-fat Ultima, you had to lean in and peer at the little emblem on the rear side-window frames.
I have to admit at this point that I have a personal reason for liking the Scorpio so much. You see, on one fateful day in the late-1990s my dad unexpectedly bought one. Cards on the table, he bought it by accident… he’d had a long history of picking up cool and interesting motors to act as our family runabouts; prior to the Scorpio we had an early Saab 900 Turbo, a Citroën CX and a mighty XM, a flaky but lovable Alfa Romeo 33 Gold Cloverleaf, a Mk1 Cavalier 2000 GLS, a Mk5 Cortina V6 – he knew his way around offbeat and amusing machinery.
Anyway, after an unfortunate dalliance with an SD3-gen Rover Vitesse, he went to an auction to see if he could pick up something interesting. Having not been to an auction for a fair few years, he slung in a practice bid on the first car to cross the block just to get his eye in, and accidentally won it for a super-cheap price. That car was an N-reg Scorpio turbo-diesel (thereby ruining his hitherto unbroken record of never owning a diesel car) in a sumptuous shade of aubergine. It was the newest car we’d ever had, being only a couple of years old; OK, Ford’s peculiar strategy for sourcing questionable-quality steel in the 1990s meant that the rear arches were already a little rusty, but aside from that it was proper top-flight exec-barge motoring for pin money. We ended up using it as the family car for a couple of years, taking it all over Europe and revelling in the splendour of luxuries we’d never experienced before, like a CD player and electric rear windows. Such fanciness!
Admittedly, it wasn’t a particularly well-made car. The boot needed a few slams to shut as it was always slightly wonky, and one day all the fluid drained out of the photochromatic rear view mirror and made a horrible mess of the dash. But it was always reliable, it had more buttons to fiddle with than we’d ever known before, it didn’t cost very much and – yes, I’m going there – it was sublime to behold. Particularly from the rear. It’s a truly good-looking car, genuinely, absolutely.
Many people will doubtless disagree with me on this. But they’re probably the sort of people who’d also disagree that Dookie is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, and that Friends was a work of unparalleled comic genius, and frankly such opinions can safely be ignored. Encapsulating the carefree whimsy of the 1990s, this is a proper feel-good car in 2020 – and I’ll die on this hill if I have to.
