Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1987 Ford Escort GL 2-door hatchback
Ford sold the Pinto subcompact from the 1971 through 1980 model years, and gave it a bit of European flavor by powering it with engines originally designed in Britain or Germany. When the time came for a modern front-wheel-drive Pinto replacement for North America, influence from across the Atlantic was even stronger. While the first-generation North American Escort was more of a first cousin than a twin to its European counterpart, it moved Ford a big step closer to selling genuine "world cars" and sold in huge numbers here, making it a very important piece of automotive history. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those first-gen Escorts, loaded with plenty of costly options.
The Escort was available in three trim levels for 1987: the El Cheapo base model, the somewhat more luxurious GL, and the hot-hatch GT. There was a two-seat coupe version known as the EXP, too, plus a Mercury-badged Escort called the Lynx.
This car is a GL hatchback, which had an MSRP of $6,801. That's about $18,817 in 2023 dollars, but the original buyer almost certainly spent a lot more than that. At first glance, there's the two-tone paint: 156 bucks for the GL, or 432 bucks after inflation.
The original radio is long gone (a two-speaker AM-only unit was standard on the GL), but we can see that this car came with one of the costliest '87 Escort options of all: air conditioning. This car appears to have the Climate Control Group, which cost $920 on the gasoline-engined Escort that year ($2,545 now).
If you're going to have refrigerated air, why not ditch the base four-on-the-floor manual transmission and get the three-speed automatic instead? The price tag for this slushbox was a sobering $490 ($1,356 in today's money). The five-speed manual added just $76 ($210 now), by the way, and its overdrive top gear would have paid for itself in gas savings within a short period.
The GT and EXP for 1987 came with a high-output version of the 1.9-liter CVH engine, but the GL got this one with 90 horsepower and 106 pound-feet.
The CVH was, legally speaking, an overhead-cam design (specifically, a "cam-in-head" design) and that's how Ford always marketed it. However, you won't see a camshaft when you remove a CVH's valve cover; it's located above the pistons, all right, but below a bank of rocker arms which are directly actuated by pushrod-style valve lifters. Opel used a similar rig for several decades.
