1996 Ford Probe! Cold Start

1996 Ford Probe
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When I was a senior in college my girlfriend lived in an apartment complex way off campus. In many ways, I had the nicer and more convenient apartment, but she had better parking so we stayed at her place most of the time. Also, her apartment had a 1996 Ford Probe in the parking lot with fire decals on the front clip and a giant decal that said “1996 Ford Probe” above the front windshield.

Ford ProbThis was, to us, the funniest thing imaginable. I’m a huge fan of this era of Probe and it’s on my list of cars I’d buy if the perfect one jumped onto my plate. Still, every time we walked by the car one of us would exclaim “1996 FORD PROBE!” It was impossible to resist.

It’s become a shorthand with my girlfriend (now wife) every time we see a car that proudly proclaims itself in some way, no matter what it is, one of us says:

1996 FORD PROBE!

Photos: Ford

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49 thoughts on “1996 Ford Probe! Cold Start

  1. Had a new black 97 GT. A little underpowered, especially coming from a 93 Talon TSi Turbo, but with the stock 225/50-16 Gaterbacks it was a LOT of fun in the twisties. No wonder they only lasted about 20k miles.

  2. You’ve got access to folks with the graphic design skills necessary: let’s see this Ford Probe turned into the “1996 FORD PROBE!” that you remember! Also, this story makes me think of the Boise LIBRARY! (the exclamation point is on the building and everything, so it must be said or yelled with sufficient enthusiasm every time).

  3. Ah, the Probe. Sister car to the Mazda 626/MX-6.

    I had a ’94 GT. I also co-drove a ’93 GT that was a total stripper – manual windows, no AC, even the standard cassette deck was delete-optioned for a regular AM/FM radio. Only “up” it had was the rear defroster – in CenDiv Series autocross events. My ’94 was heavier just by virtue of the standard passenger airbag, but I didn’t help it by optioning it up ’cause it was my daily. I didn’t get the sunroof because that chopped enough headroom out that I couldn’t fit in the car at all – the sunroof track ran directly over my head and I need that extra headroom, though I am the weirdo who brought his helmet with him to test-sit cars before ordering his.

    I did put a custom mandrel-bent 2.5″ cat-back exhaust on it – well, I paid Watson Engineering to do it – with a SuperTrapp muffler. 7 discs on the street kept it quiet enough, and we’d uncork it at autocross events. That V6 made a healthy sound. Mine hit the rev limiter about 8500 RPM (approximate as the tach markings ended at 8k), though the redline was marked at 7000. I’d been assured the limiter was there for the alternator and power steering pump and that the engine itself was good to very close to 10,000 rpm before the valves would float.

    Ghods, I loved that car. We had many adventures. It was a tremendous highway car as well as a handling beast with just a little shock tuning and an alignment (a set of sticky BFG R1s didn’t hurt, either, though I didn’t run those on the street).

    At 170k miles, the motor was starting to feel a little “off”, and I sourced a 30k take-out engine, which we refreshed with gaskets and seals (this also allowed us to inspect its innards to verify condition, which was as stated) and new timing belt/water pump/etc. New clutch, a quick inspection of the transaxle and some new fluid there, and it was back in business.

    …for another 6000 miles when a lady decided to just STOP in the middle of Telegraph Road in West Bloomfield Township and despite my best efforts to avoid, wound up clipping the RR corner of the car between me and the idiot with the LF corner of mine. The infamous low-overlap offset collision. Bags didn’t go off, but it pushed the front rail and shotgun real bad. If it hadn’t also popped the left tie-rod out of the steering rack, might’ve been able to fix it, but once the insurance inspector saw that, coupled with the mileage, it got totaled. We did show receipts on the engine work and got a good payout for it, and its shift knob resides with me still.

    Interestingly, a few years later, I got a notification that the car was in Florida. Unsurprisingly, someone bought it at the insurance auction, did the repairs, and sold it on. I don’t really want it back now, 21 years after I lost it when it sacrificed itself for my safety, but I have to trust it was good to its next owner(s).

    Now, show me one in the optional “peach” color and I’ll invite an airbrush artist to do a little work making a darker vertical spot on the nose in just the right place…

  4. Had a 93 GT. I called it the Probe-lem. Electronic Window stopped working on the passenger side. Starter went out at like 70k miles, transmission was gone by around 120k.

    Tires were also kind of spendy for a car that honestly wasn’t all that powerful.

    Suspension and handling was pretty decent for a fwd. I had a Saturn SC2 previously that also handled pretty well for the time. Neither made a ton of power but you could merge pretty decently because you could game the cloverleaf if you had open ramp ahead of you.

  5. I had a 94 GT that looked just like the one in the picture. I loved that car but blew a couple of cylinders. My parents needed up getting it fixed and passing it down to my brothers who destroyed it. Not to get all car nerdy here but I don’t think the one in the picture is a 96… The rims on the 95s and 96s were 5 spokes but were more curved than the 94s and earlier.

  6. Confession. I bought a brand new PURPLE Probe GT (manual). I loved the looks of that car so much. No, I am not gay, but I got accused of it frequently by other drivers because of my choice. I kept that car so clean it looked absolutely factory fresh when I sold it with 40k miles. I replaced it with a Nagaro Blue S4, which was an acceptable replacement in my mind.

  7. I like the concept cars the Probe was based upon. They were slippery little bastards. The actual car that was built, I’m not a fan, as it had double the drag, and was front wheel drive, and underpowered.

    The 1983 Ford Probe IV had a drag coefficient of 0.152. The 1985 Ford Probe V had a drag coefficient of 0.137, although the front wheel covers would have been an issue. The IV was a body that definitely could have been produced and sold with the tech of the era.

    What I’d have liked to have seen done, would have been to forget the Probe, and for the next Mustang of the late 80s or early 90s to have been similarly slippery to the aforementioned Probe concepts, kept RWD, with the 5.0 V8 lowered into it, and long-legged gearing to maximize its top speed as well as fuel economy. With the stock 225 ponies in the 5.0, if the car ended up with the same frontal area as the 5.0 we got but had a Cd value around 0.16, it would have topped out around 190 mph with optimized gearing. AND as a nice bonus, probably would have gotten over 40 mpg highway doing 70-80 mph.

    THAT is the Mustang we should have gotten with the tech of the late 1980s/early 1990s. And once NiMH batteries became a thing, Ford could have made an electric offering of this thing with 150 miles range in the late 1990s that did 0-60 mph around 7 seconds.

    1. I meant to say that the flexible front wheel covers of the Probe V concept would have been an issue to produce and use. The solid covers of the IV were doable.

    2. I like your thoughts about the Probe development. I do think that if Ford tried your lowered and slippery Mustang concept, we’d have received a car similar to the Camaro of that generation. I think Mustang people like sitting more upright, and it might have affected their core enthusiasts to aggressively alter that feature. Also note that a lot of Mustang customers are buying base models, and they might not want the lower seating. We make fun of the Mustang II for being a regrettable car, but it sold like crazy!

      1. The Camaro of that era didn’t have the aero. It had all the styling cues of having that sort of streamlining, without the streamlining to go with it. Bonneville Salt Flats racers can attest to it lending itself well to being slippery with some very basic body modifications that don’t dramatically alter its appearance.

        But back to this idea. I made this statement assuming the same frontal area as the car we actually got, which would imply roughly the same height. If the base model had a 4-cylinder engine, and was in such a slippery package, it would have been getting fuel economy comparable to today’s Toyota Prius, AND with optimized gearing, even if it only had 90 horsepower like the iline-4 version of the Mustang LX of the era, top speed still would have been in excess of 140 mph.

        Aero that is worlds apart from its contemporary offerings would have made it a much faster car for the money, at least on the highway at higher speeds.

  8. While these were nice cars, the problem with them was they felt and were a bit slower than the 1st gen Probe GT with the Turbocharged 2.2L 4 cyl which in theory had less horsepower… 145hp vs 164hp.

    1. Then replaced with the Cougar. Both were pretty disastrous sales wise, when Vauxhall Calibras and Peugeot 406 coupes were selling in big numbers.
      To me, not that I was anything other than a car nerd teenager, both Probe and Cougar looked cheap and American, in an uncool way, not pony car way.

  9. I had two 2nd gen Probe GTs- a ’95 from 2001 to 2007, and a ’97 from 2007 to 2013. Both were great cars. These were the best handling FWD cars I have ever driven, even better than my Mk6 GTi in my opinion. I also liked the interior room and driving position, it worked well for me at 6’4″ and 225 lb. Could have used more power, and the engine was sensitive to ambient temperature – it didn’t like hot weather. Mine were very reliable, but the interior fit and finish wasn’t the best. I think it is too bad they left this car with no development, only cutting costs over its lifetime.

  10. I had a blue ’93 4cyl/5speed in college to replace an ’87 mercury lynx XR3 that was getting up near 200k. Blue Probe had good gas mileage in the mid 30’s, fantastic lightweight fwd made winter fun with snow tires, very balanced. With the probe’s interior removed, a 250cc dirtbike could fit in the back, provided you pulled both wheels. I “raced” autocross w/ it, and it developed a rod knock, probably because i was bouncing it off the rev limiter…new engine from a mazda 626 was easy to install.
    Being poor in college, I couldn’t afford such opulent luxuries like a starter (mine failed by catching fire trying to start the car on a -25 degree ADK morning), so i pop-started it for 2 years. You can always find even the slightest of grades in a sea of flat parking lots when you live and die by the starterless car.
    The interior material quality was very bad. When the half-acre sheet of hard door plastic starts to squeek, dont bother fixing it, just say goodbye to that panel and move on with your life.
    I gave it to a friend to move across country with- he found that after the car had sat for a year, mice had moved into the hvac ducts, so the dash and ducts all came out for a couple cross country drives. Sans interior, he was able to fit an enormous 2″ thick slab of granite that filled the entire area behind the front seats and also lashed a honda CT70 to the roof. This gentleman also lived at the end of a half mile road called “what road” that regularly embarrassed 4 wheel drive trucks. These cars were tough.

  11. First real car was a ’95 SE in red with spoiler, started my fascination with sports cars! Hit three antelope in a freak accident. The third being an unborn baby that my car birthed…

    Sold back to dealer (lol) and for a ’96 SE in green. Both were simply wonderful cats, but the transmissions were the weak point.

    I was poor so I could never get the ’97 GTS sitting in my credit unions repo lot, that was a dream car to me.

    Bought first wife an ’96 MX-6 GT(?) Manual with the 6. Wholly crap was that a fun car! Granted, with the sun roof and me being 6’1″ I absolutely didn’t fit in it… My BIL still has it, needs much work to run though.

    Very fond memories of the twins…

  12. My SIL had a GT in silver back in the ’10s when it has 200k+ as a $1k beater. It ran surprisingly well and made it almost a year of her inability to comprehend maintenance mechanically totalled it.
    I think the reason it didn’t sell worth a damn is there were so much better sport coupes on the market at that price point. I would rather have a 16v ‘rocco or a vr6 ‘rado but you could get some truly amazing jdm coupes for similar money new.

  13. Always liked the styling of the last gen Ford Probe but while in high school I kinda wrote them off because FWD sucks. Now, 15 years after getting out of that hellhole, I’m realizing I might have been too harsh on them. It’s a neat alternative to the Prelude of the same era.

    1. If they had marketed it as competition to the Prelude and not floated it as a Mustang replacement, it may have stuck around longer.

      What I don’t know is whether it would have ever become more interesting. This was right after the time of the Escort EXP, a neat little hatchback that I thought should have been given some real performance options instead of just the taste that the turbo offered.

      I liked the looks of the Probe a lot. The performance wasn’t much for the money, and to be honest, the Probe name put it at the back of my list.

      Sort of how I’d hesitate a long time before buying a Nissan Juke or Kia Soul. I passed on a new Soul during the first year of production because the seats had “SOUL SOUL SOUL” repeated about a million times, woven right into the fabric.

  14. In around the year 2001, my girlfriend in high school had one of these. We were driving somewhere one day, and I noticed a knocking sound so I had her pull into a service station and pop the hood so I could take a look. I pulled the dipstick out and it was bone dry. I put four quarts of oil in it and told her we were going straight back to her parents’ house.

    I can’t remember how much longer she had that thing, but it drank oil like a Transformer. Sadly, it never transformed into Bumblebee. But she transformed into a giant hoe not too long after!

  15. I too liked the Probe, thought seriously about buying one at the time (yeah, I’m that old)(ugly too). Test drove a V6 and was impressed. My wife had a contemporary Mazda MX6 (she preferred the interior styling).

    The Probe was a very good car at the time, in large part because it was essentially a Mazda. Ford originally planned for the Probe to be the next Mustang, to replace the Fox body car in 1989.

    In the mid and late 1980’s, long after the acute oil shocks and crises of the 1970’s, fuel economy and prices were still an issue. All pony cars were facing stiff competition from the generally more fuel-efficient Japanese cars.

    Ford, seeing the handwriting on the wall, and trying to both hedge its bets as well as learn from the competition, bought a 25% stake in Mazda in 1979, ultimately increasing it to 33.4% by 1996 and becoming a controlling shareholder (in 2008, cash-strapped Ford sold 20% of it’s ownership in Mazda, and in 2015 sold the remaining 13%).

    Ford planned for the Probe to be the next Mustang, with the platform shared with the Mazda MX-6. Plans were well along for this to happen, but after a front-page story in Autoweek on April 13, 1987, Mustang fans flooded Ford with thousands of outraged letters, reportedly about 100,000. Autoweek readers responded with anger and disgust, with one helpfully providing the contact addresses at Ford for fans to send their thoughts on the subject.

    http://amv-prod-aut.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/s3fs-public/19870413com.pdf

    A story goes about John Coletti, then design manager for the Mustang, during a 1988 studio visit with his boss Ken Dabrowski. They looked at a Ford Probe wearing a ‘GT’ badge. Coletti reportedly asked, “What the hell is that?”, to which Dabrowski explained it was the new Mustang. Coletti then reportedly said, “That may be a lot of things, but a Mustang it isn’t!” He knew the move to front-wheel drive, and the inability to have a V8, were both stakes in the Mustang’s heart.

    Instead of firing Coletti, to his credit Dabrowski passed his lack of enthusiasm for the ‘new Mustang’ up the chain of command. When it reached new CEO and Chairman Alex Trotman, he had the vision to order a “fresh eyes look” on the situation. The project was too far along to cancel, so the car was launched as the Probe. Coletti set up a skunkworks to keep the Mustang alive, which resulted in the SN-95 car that debuted in 1994.

    This was the second time the Mustang cheated death. The first was when it was almost cancelled after 1973, but was rescued by the Mustang II. Lacking as that car was, it kept the model alive through the dark, gas-rationed Malaise era years and was the right car for the time.

    But the end of the road is probably really in sight for the Mustang now. Ford says a new ‘all electric Mustang’ (an oxymoron if there ever was one) will debut in 2029 (maybe a coupe version of the Mach-E?). Jim Farley seems to have drunk deeply from the EV KoolAid, and is hell-bent on going electric.

    It was a great run while it lasted. Get one now while you still can.

    https://carbuzz.com/news/fords-all-electric-mustang-will-begin-production-in-2029

    1. While these were nice cars, the problem with them was they felt and were a bit slower than the 1st gen Probe GT with the Turbocharged 2.2L 4 cyl which in theory had less horsepower… 145hp vs 164hp.

      1. It was pretty much accepted at the time that the turbo was making closer to 180hp than the 145 it was rated at. The V6 was much more refined but that turbo 4 was a beast.

    2. Whoops… Ignore my last reply… that was meant as a general comment.

      Now having said that, I disagree that going all-electric will kill the Mustang. Yeah, the Mach-E is not a real Mustang and they should really remove the ‘Mustang’ part of the name.

      But if they make a great looking electric coupe and convertible that performs well, there is no reason why it can’t be successful.

      And regarding the ‘EV Koolaid’… The reality is that if they don’t go the EV route, it will guarantee that the Mustang will be dead in about 10 years as it will become unsellable in some big markets like California, China and the EU.

      1. To each their own. Some people might be thrilled with a battery Mustang. I’m not one of them. An EV Mustang might sell in California, China, and the EU. But maybe not in the rest of the country.

        I don’t care about ‘numbers’ for bragging rights, and I don’t care that an EV has ‘maximum torque at zero rpm.’ To me the only thing that matters is how a car *feels* to drive in the seat of my pants. Does it have personality and character? Does it give me a sh!t-eating grin when I row through the gears on a twisty New England road? Is it just plain fun?

        Some people love EVs. More power to them (no pun intended). To me an EV, any EV, regardless of the ‘numbers’, is a bland, anodyne, soulless transportation pod. My washing machine also has maximum torque at zero rpm, but it doesn’t excite me and I wouldn’t want to drive it down a twisty road.

        I’m all for stopping burning things for our power. It’s the only way to save the planet, and ourselves. When, or if, the time comes when the world electric power grid is truly decarbonized and renewables are the source of the majority of global electricity, EVs will make perfect sense and should be the primary form of ground transportation.

        But the Mustang is a sports car, or a Pony Car if you prefer. Its mission in life is to be pure fun, plain and simple. Maybe with some throwback nostalgia mixed in for the days of rumbling V8’s and manual transmissions. It’s not meant to be basic or economical transportation. Not every car on the road has to be a battery powered appliance.

    3. Another interesting point of note vis-a-vis the ’93 Probe:

      The Probe was released for sale to the public the same year as the Lincoln MKVIII. The MKVIII was filled with a variety of cutting edge (for the time) components and technologies ranging from a new high-output version of the 4.6L modular V8, automatic climate control, six-way power seats with powered lumbar and two-position memory (for the driver’s seat), auto up/down windows, an electronic message center with: compass, fuel efficiency, engine oil life information, a 10-disc CD changer, and electrochromic dimming mirrors. In fact, the MKVIII was regarded as such an engineering and development triumph within Ford internally that the MKVIII team believed the car was a shoo-in for MotorTrend Car of the Year in 1993. Instead, the Probe won, much to my dad’s pleasure (he was the Chief Program Engineer for the 2nd generation Probe), and to the chagrin of the MKVIII team and many Ford higher-ups.

      Plans for a high-performance version of the Probe GT were shelved mid-way through development in or about mid-1994 as well. The prototype vehicle had a freer-breathing version of the KL V6 engine that generated more than 200bhp and had a more or less straight-through 2.5″+ exhaust system. I was driven in the car many times, and it was both very LOUD, and substantially quicker than the 164hp stock Probe GT. The hi-po version was killed off because it was both better handling than the Fox and SN95 Mustangs, quicker in a straight line than most versions of the Mustang, and would have been cheaper as well.

    4. It’s amazing that Ford was considering modernizing the Mustang in ’87, but then after deciding the old design should stick around a few more years, kept it going until 2014.
      It reminds me of when the 911 was set to die in the late 70s, being replaced by the more modern 928. They decided against it, and 45 years later, still same old 911.

  16. Senior year in high school, I was dating a girl that went to a different school (yeah yeah, I know). My schedule had me having a study hall last period for the whole year. Being the AV nerd that I was, I had the director write me a permanent pass to go up to the tv studio instead. So what I would do was wait about 10 minutes into the period and then take my 88 Monte Carlo over to her school’s parking lot and wait for them to get out and drive her home. There was a dude that she went to school with that I was an acquaintance of (and who would later become a really good friend of mine) because of us playing in punk bands and he had a white 94 Probe. He would come out and start this thing up and it burned oil so bad it would fill the whole parking lot up with smoke. He beat the absolute tar out of this car. There was very San Francisco type hill near by that he, and another buddy with his Plymouth Laser, would just rally jump all the time, and we would laugh hysterically. One time we took it into the woods behind his school and offroaded this poor thing. This car would take anything you’d throw at it. He did eventually end up fixing the oil burning, and he drove that car for another 5 years or so, and then started the era of the tailgate style Civic hatchbacks. But I have fond memories of that Probe, and earned a lot of respect for the Probe in general during those years. I still always send him the listing any time I see one on Craigslist or whatever, trying to talk him into getting another lol. Thing was a little tank

  17. Is there any reason these things flopped other than the fact that they were the butt (so to speak) of one very predictable joke that presumably stopped being funny after about the third time Keith made it on the middle school bus? I like the styling, and I hear they had decent mechanicals underneath. Was it really just The Joke that sunk this car?

    1. I see what you did there.

      I know for around where I lived, the Probe was always kinda seen as the “girly” alternative to the Mustang. I never really understood why, I always thought they looked cool

    2. I think they got tanked by the general switch to SUVs as the “fun vehicles” starting in the late ’90s. The sport coupe market kinda died then. The pony cars kept going b/c nostalgia, but the sport coupe thing didn’t have that old-school kinda street cred, so…

    3. FWD, was supposed to be a Mustang but an uproar stopped it. Domestic buyers wanted brawn and RWD, for other buyers the Ford oval wasn’t necessarily a plus. Personally, I would a thousand times rather have an MX-6.

      1. This is my memory too. When the 1st generation Probe was released it was rumored to replace the Mustang but nobody wanted a FWD pony car so they gave it the worst possible name and that basically sunk the car. The 2nd gen was better looking than the first but it was still saddled with that name. I remember seeing plenty of them back in the 90s so they definitely sold a few.

    4. For the time they were reviewed well IIRC. I suppose they were a bit of a tweener in sporty coupes for the time, with the V6 – so it maybe wasn’t as spunky as an Integra or pre-2000 Eclipse for the rise of tuner culture and Fast & Furious craze and all.

      The final Mercury Cougar (the FWD, Contour-based one) was originally to be a 3rd-gen Ford Probe, but it likely wouldn’t have made much of a difference. The old Contour powertrains didn’t make any more power really than the Probe did ~6 years prior, so not only did it not fit with the Integra class, but it wasn’t as powerful or equipped against the larger Accord or Solara coupes or even the 2000 Eclipse with the V6. Coupes were becoming more limited to budget entries, and for that Ford had the Escort ZX2 right after the Probe.

      Then as mentioned development dollars were going to SUVs and utility vehicles, and Ford and Mazda were pretty set with the Escape/Tribute.

  18. Actually, quite a decent car. Mazda underpinnings, and a design that looked better in person than in photos.

    My preference was for the Probe over the MX-6 Mazda. They rolled off the same assembly line, and both were handsome, but I suspected Ford did some tweaking to the chassis, making their version more fun to drive hard.

    1. Agree, I liked the looks of both of them – peak ’90s sportcoupe.

      For me, the pop ups on the Ford plus the slightly more sculpted body always won the day, looked a little more pleasingly unique.

  19. My college roommate had a Probe with the V6, Momo rims, and a slightly lowered suspension. It was easily the best looking Probe I’ve seen. He used to drive the hell out of it, especially on the backroads around Virginia Tech. I did have the misfortune of once being crammed into the backseat on trip back to his parents’ house in Richmond. Not fun. Much better in the front seats.

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