Oh Ford Tempo, No One Loves You: COTD

Cotd Tempo Ts
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In case you missed it, yesterday’s Shitbox Showdown pit a 1990 Ford Tempo against a 1990 Lincoln Mark VII (that’s the cool Fox-body one, if you’re a casual Lincoln fan). Now, odd pairings are no stranger to The Showdown, nor are blowout wins. But there’s usually still a fair amount of affection or at least grudging respect in the comments even for landslide losers. Not today though. Hoo boy, the poor Tempo was absolutely heaped in derision, with nary a fan in attendance. And so, today’s Comments of the Day are your unvarnished opinions of the blue-oval’s unloved economobile, which are fine reading at the end of a long Monday.

Sbsd 4 24 2023
BUT, let’s pause for one moment to bestow an arched eyebrow for this tale from JuarassicJeep25, which assures at least one Tempo, gutless and crude as it may have been, was undeniably durable–if sneakily so:

Tempo Story Rb

Surely we can give the Tempo the tiniest smidge of love for such longevity? No? OK. Without any further ado, we give you all the loathing that was heaped upon the poor Tempo:

Cotd Tempo 1Cotd Tempo 2Cotd Tempo 3Cotd Tempo 4

Cotd Tempo 5

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50 thoughts on “Oh Ford Tempo, No One Loves You: COTD

  1. Trying loving and owning a 1990 Pontiac Sunbird as your toy/fun car. The internet “laugh” reacts and hateful comments write themselves. But I think even *I* have it slightly better than Ford Tempo enthusiasts, of which there are some (I know a few).

  2. Ford definitely made worse cars, more unreliable cars, etc..

    But the Tempo was unique that it just excelled at nothing while also having mediocre reliability compared with anything japanese of the same size/price.

    However, Tempos must have sold decently because they used to be very common to see. I’ve probably ridden/driven a dozen or more TempoTopazes in my life, but I couldn’t tell you anything memorable about them other than they were slow and the back seat leg room was garbage….contour followed the same idea… just with worse build quality than the Tempo.

    1. I can’t agree regarding the Contour. I previously had a Tempo and found a manual Contour priced too good to pass up. It was a thousand times better on the road. Lots of fun, and pretty economical, too.

      Initial quality was much better, but overall, after 100k miles, it ended up being just as shitty. The motor and transmission were still flawless when it went to the junkyard, outdone by a combination of structural rust and the price of fixing the worn out suspension on both ends and the AC system.

      I felt like I got good value out of the Contour mainly because after almost $6000 in incentives, I paid slightly over 2/3 of MSRP. Several thousand less than the next nearest car in its size class, a Hyundai Elantra, which at that time was still an undeniably shitty car from an undeniably shitty manufacturer.

      1. Contours were just shitty in different ways. It was a “world car” and had the lack of back seat leg room to show it. The dashboards would peel back in the U.S. because they were designed in Europe and couldn’t handle the temp fluctuations (Land rover had similar problems in the U.S. at the time.) so I did a few of the dash “fixes” from Ford and forever hated the Contour.

        …with that being said, the Contour did look better and certainly drove better than a Tempo. I also do have a bit of a soft spot for the SVT Contour because it was unexpected and got good reviews at the time, but I’ve never driven one since they were pretty rare.

        And to be clear, I probably would have purchased the Contour in your situation as well if the price was right. There were worse cars out there at the time, and mechanically the Contours did better than average fords. i.e. the CD4E Automatics were WAY more reliable the the garbage Taurus transaxles (AXOD, AX4S, AX4N) and the 4 cylinders were Zetec’s so they wouldn’t eat valve seats unexpectedly like the 1.9’s in the Escorts/Focuses of the same era. V6’s were good, but did have a plastic water pump impeller that would crack in half and would overheat the motor quickly.

    2. The Tempo did spend a few years as a top 10 best-seller, so it did sell well.

      Maybe history would be a bit kinder to the Tempo/Topaz if they came out a little earlier than 1984 – development started in the ’70s and IIRC it was delayed or pushed back a bit whether from Ford’s financial troubles or just other factors. While more aero-looking than its domestic competition, it was also 2 to almost 5 years later than most of those models to market and only Ford’s second FWD line while GM and Chrysler had several models by then.

  3. I will give the tempo/topaz some love. . .growing up, we has a bunch of them: beige, white, blue, and red. Beige was a coupe (oohhh, sporty!). Two were autos, two were manuals. Learned to drive on those cars, so I have found memories. They seems to just keep going, despite a lack of real maintance attention or teenage driving. They, in my hands, were off roaded, spun off the road, jumped, and my mom still put over 200K on her car. The 90’s, they were wild times. I told her about all the things I did to that car after she finally got rid of it.

    Fast forward to a few years back, someone brought a mint condition brown one to the spring autoshow in Saratoga. I geeked out cuase I thought it was awesome. It got my vote for best in show. . .most likely it’s only vote ever.

    Great cars.

    1. Yeah, why not just say ‘Wow that Tempo got some serious hate’ and link to the comments of the original article… COTD is already super meta, this is just next level.

  4. Just curious, was there ever a Tempo that didn’t blow a head gasket? Anyone, anyone?

    I guess the ones that were totaled in accidents maybe, but I feel like they probably did too out of sympathy for the others.

    What horrible pieces of malaise era leftovers they were.

    1. One of my grandmothers had an ’87 AWD, with its original head gasket intact when she stopped driving in 2003 or so. Of course, she drove no more than about 1500 miles a year.

    2. 3.0L Vulcan V6 powered Tempos didn’t really have that issue. The holy grail of reliable tempos is probably the V6/Manual combo they made briefly, same drivetrain was in the 1st gen Probe for a second as well.

      I think there was just something about head/block/gasket designs of that era where Ford, Chrysler, and GM all had issues. Specifically on their mass market 4 cylinder engines and V6’s, V8’s not so much.

      This is why I dislike the Ford 3.8 V6 (in general – except for the Super Coupes)

  5. The Tempo/Topaz twins are generally considered junk, but let me tell you, in 1984 getting a new car, any car, was a vast improvement over my well-used 1972 Plymouth Valiant with the leaning tower of power and vinyl bench seats. I was the junior partner in a typesetting/graphics design firm, and one day the senior partner said let’s get some tax breaks, your new car is out in the parking lot. It was a white four-door Tempo with the manual transmission; and glory be, it had air conditioning, power steering, and an FM band on the radio. What joy! In 1986 it was replaced with a similar sedan in grey–I had to give that back when I left the company. Other than an alternator in the ’84 which gave up after 150 miles of leaving the factory, both were reliable–and for us, quite comfortable. But several times I had to drive my partner’s ’84 Accord two-door, and it was quite obvious that the Honda was a better, albeit more expense, car.

  6. After I first drove a Tempo, I remember thinking to myself. “If this is how the American car industry is going to take on the Japanese, the industry is in for a world of hurt.”

  7. Fuck the Tempo. My mother had one and it was the biggest piece of shit. We had an auto 85 four door model. That thing accelerated 0-60 in years. The electrical gremlins were spectacular at killing the battery and the A/C drain would get constantly clogged up and leak water into the cabin. Fuck that thing to tell and back, it was the most miserable car ever. The bolts for the wheels sheered right off and only one was holding them in place. There’s a special place in hell for that thing. My mother had it replaced by an 89 Dodge Shadow with the 2.5 V6. That thing was a damn rocket ship tech and driving wise compared to the Tempo.

  8. There was someone who was pretty active on the other side who was really into Ford Tempos, fanatical about them, you might say, so there are enthusiasts around.

    We had one as a family car when I was really young, an ’84 in brown, with a burgundy velour interior. Have some memories of it, most of them are waiting around for a tow truck on the side of the road or in parking lots (Veterans Stadium and Willow Grove Park Mall being two of the places it decided to die)

    1. Ford Tempo Fanatic, he was active enough that people just referred to him as FTF. I don’t know if it was because of him, but there was also a lot of Tempo content back then.

  9. I’m kind of glad to see it just wasn’t my imagination in regards to just how remarkably bad the Tempo was. My family had a Chevette and 2 Dodge Aries K-cars when I was growing up, so I was no stranger to shitboxes from that era, but riding in my uncle’s white 4-cylinder 4-speed Tempo was the worst, and I could never figure out exactly why. A case where the whole equals much less than the sum of its parts.

  10. I had a 1986 Ford Tempo sedan as my first car — purchased from a family friend — with the motor-driven seatbelts and blinding red interior. It was solid for the two years I owned it, and I moved on to better things.

  11. The most striking thing about the Tempo isn’t how awful it was. It isn’t even that they somehow sold this terrible piece of crap through *1994*, somehow. It’s that what replaced it was the Contour!

    Widely and correctly regarded as one of the best handling cars of its day, the fact that you could walk into a Ford dealer in 1994 and pick up a Contour or a leftover Tempo somehow makes the Tempo’s entire existence an insult. The Contour proved that Ford could make a world class small(ish) car; they just for many years chose not to.

    1. Same at Mopar showrooms, with the cloud cars and Neon showing up there around the same time. Although that was a bit of Iacocca insisting on conservative vehicle designs for longer than was appropriate.

      Granted, the Tempo was a big seller for Ford, so they arguably saw no reason not to. If you wanted something nice, buy a dang Taurus!

      I’ve wondered if Ford let the Tempo languish longer than they might have because they were trying to sync up different programs, but it still feels long that it took almost 2 years between the Mondeo going on sale and the Contour coming out.

      In a different timeline, I wonder if Ford would have tapped Mazda for a sedan in the segment, like they did the Escort – more akin to the Probe/MX-6 partnership. In Australia the 626 was sold as the Telstar until the Mondeo came out.

    2. You know what? This is an interesting concept; What maligned car had the greatest improvement from generation or replacement to the next? The Contour replacing the Tempo might be one of the biggest jumps in quality from model year to model year ever.

      I can’t imagine hating myself enough to buy a Tempo in 1994.

      1. I would say the cloud cars replacing the Dodge Shadow and Plymouth Sundance were a giant leap in design/quality. My mom went from a 92 Sundance to a 94 (I think) Dodge Stratus and the difference was amazing. I remember the Sundance had less than 100K and the transmission was already slipping. Unfortunately, the Stratus had a penchant for eating head gaskets towards the end of its life. My father ended up trading that in, his Dodge Ram B250 conversion van, and the 87 Dodge Omni hatchback for a 2000……Daewoo Nubira CDX station wagon. We had that thing all the way up until late last year. My brother in law took that car from my parents and thoroughly trashed it.

        1. Pedantically, the Shadow/Sundance were replaced by the Neon, while the Cloud cars replaced the Acclaim/Spirit/LeBaron (the broughamy sedan version, obviously).

          Incidentally, my uncle bought an early Neon a year or two after my parents bought a new Sundance – the Neon was a far nicer car, but more problematic than the Sundance that, by the time we got rid of it, had nothing worse than a bit of rust on the trunk lid.

        2. Our Stratus ate head gaskets like a fleet of mid 00’s Subarus (my family has a lot of hate for that car, lol). But I understand why it was successful at the time as it looked great, and drove competently for the time.

          My modern vote would be for the sixth to seventh generation Malibu. The sixth gen Malibu was genuinely terrible looking, and the interior made Chrysler products of the time blush. Just such a turd. The seventh gen Malibu suddenly launched it as a genuine Camry/Accord rival for a time. Pretty huge step up.

          1. That’s a good call, as are the Stratus/Cirrus—but these are mere gorges compared to the Grand Canyon in difference between the Tempo and the Contour. The Contours (especially the early ones, before they started decontenting them) genuinely felt like the European cars they were. Hell, given the doldrums at VW in the mid 90s, they were *better* than cars with real
            European pedigrees.

            Keep in mind that 5 years earlier, Ford was trying to sell the Contour’s European predecessor as a premium coupe. People say that Ford cancelled the Merkur, but they didn’t, really—they decided to sell it *in place of the Tempo.*

            The 1995 Contour SE was a genuinely shocking car. It was like if GM decided to replace the 1990 Caprice with an E34 BMW.

            1. Yeah, I really hoped they kept on merging overseas/domestic designs. The Focus was more or less the same (sans front and rear bumper differences amongst other things) until the second gen. Now we’re back to Ford of Europe not only having non-suv alternatives but no American equivalent.

      2. I wouldn’t either, but the Tempo went for Corolla/Civic money or less and looked like more car at least on paper (bigger!…outside. bigger standard engine!…with the same hp).

        1. I understand, but man, I would have been really sad to be stuck in a car designed at the end of the malaise era instead of one of the genuinely good pick just about any other sedan of the 90s.

          If we had gif capability, a Tempo in 1994 would be worth a gobivemadeahugemistake.gif

  12. My best friend from childhood bought a used 4-door white ’91 Tempo GL in 2003.

    It was immaculate, without a scratch or dent on it and without a stain or rip in the interior. All for $500.

    The car was dreadfully slow, but still faster than the out-of-tune Suzuki Sidekick I drove. The speedometer only went to 85 mph, but I think he got it to hit 100 mph on the freeway more than once. He drove it like he was trying to hoon it, except it just wouldn’t hoon.

    I have many fond memories rolling around stoned as a passenger in that thing listening to Snoop Dogg and picking up intoxicating substances. Tripping on mushrooms, it felt like being in a spaceship, floating over the road.

    The last time I saw it in 2008, it was in as good of shape as when he bought it(other than the fact that it constantly reeked of marijuana). His girlfriend totaled that car the same year. She flipped it 6 times. He got at least 100,000 miles out of it when all was said and done, without having to make a single repair.

    If I were to seek one out, I’d want the diesel with a manual.

  13. And so, today’s Comments of the Day are your unvarnished opinions of the blue-oval’s unloved economobile, which are fine reading at the end of a long Monday.

    Or, you know, at the beginning of a Tuesday. Whatever. 🙂

  14. In summer 1993 I’d just finished uni in the U.K. and did a 6000 mile road trip round the west of the US with two friends. It was an amazing trip but we used my mother’s 1987 Escort wagon which was truly awful – no power, no equipment, mouse belts, crap stereo – years behind Ford Europe’s offerings of the time. But we and it survived the trip so it got some grudging respect. When we returned, my mother, who also hated that car, ran towards it like a long-lost friend. On asking why, the response was “I’ve had to drive a rental Ford Tempo for the past six weeks.”

  15. I am so sorry I missed this one.

    The Tempo is the reason that I am not a professional musician.

    Circa 1994 I was at a crossroads with some life choices. I played bass with a number of Jazz combos around town. I had pretty much made up my mind as to what I was going to do with my life at that time, but what cinched the deal was we had a rehearsal at my house.

    It was kind of a grey, dismal day, and I was feeling kind of grey and dismal myself. The saxophonist, who looked to be in his 50’s, but was probably younger (rough life) showed up in a baby blue Tempo/Topaz. It was a depressing, awful car. It sputtered into my driveway, and then after rehearsal, it wouldn’t start. After some messing around under the hood, it sputtered back to “life”, and limped away. It was so sad and pathetic.

    And I remember thinking “If being a musician means having to drive a Topaz, then I can’t be a musician.”

    1. The Tempo is the reason that I am not a professional musician.

      I’m just gonna sit here and marvel at the unintended beauty of that sentence.

      1. I wish I could say that it was intended, but it was not.

        I suppose if you were to ask some of the musicians I worked with, they’d say that the Tempo was only one of my problems. But, what I lacked in talent and ability I made up for with Volume…

  16. In April 1986, my parents ordered our first new car – a 5-speed manual 2-door Ford Tempo, few options other than maybe A/C. My brother and I picked gold paint. We were pretty excited, the car was due mid-July and we were planning to drive it on our first big vacation later that summer.

    On July 8, 1986 a train carrying mixed cargo crashed near Miamisburg, OH. 30,000 people were evacuated when a tank car filled with white phosphorous ignited after a derailment, sending hundreds to the hospital.

    The car we ordered was on the train that crashed, and it burned up. I’ve since found a few pictures from the scene, there were definitely a few burned up (and smashed up) car carriers. It ended up being good in the end, they replaced our car with the only manual Tempo on the lot – a fully loaded (for a Tempo, for 1986) GL Sport, in a dark grey that probably aged much better. Quite a nice upgrade, I always liked that car. Thinking about it, I’d bet CSX (or their insurance) probably paid the difference.

  17. In retrospect, I fear I was too kind to the Tempo.

    No one mentioned the Tempo that will no doubt be on Mercedes’s Holy Grail List one day: the four-wheel drive version. I drove one (briefly), and an Audi Quattro it wasn’t. No center diff, so it wasn’t to be used in dry conditions. Hooked up to the Mighty Four (the sole choice), it wasn’t to be used in ANY conditions.

    Aargh.

    1. Ha! She beat you to it.

      It’s been interesting watching this younger generation look back at that era of cars with affection, when all I remember about so many of them was just how terrible they were, especially American brands.

      I learned to drive in my Grandma’s 1977 Rabbit that she bought new, but then she traded it on a new Tempo in 1984 and I still remember the first time she let me drive it – it was so depressing – such a step down from the Rabbit. I mean, my mom had a 1979 Ford Fairmont Futura, which wasn’t terrible to look at, was built on the Fox platform so it was RWD, but had the 2.3L that the Tempo engine evolved from. I nearly drove the wheels off that Futura, but that thing was still a POS… if you turned the wheel to the stop in either direction, the engine stalled – AND FORD SOLD THEM THAT WAY! It was normal!

      One of the few exceptions was the Chevy Celebrity Eurosport a friend’s dad drove. That was the preferred cruising vessel of my group of friends, mainly because it had 4 doors and the V6 had a bit a poke compared to the 4-bangers in the rest of our cars, along with decent handling for the time.

      But on topic… the Ford Tempo was trash from the moment you drove it off the Ford lot.

      1. I had a Celeb as my first car of my own. It wasn’t terrible. Not by any means great, but it was comfortable, spacious enough for my enormous self, and at least enough power to get out of its own way.

        1. The Celebrity and other FWD A-bodies’ secret sauce was that they were in fact Citation X-bodies with stretched front and rear overhangs and upcontenting to fit the midsize price class.
          As such, they arrived in 1982 with their bugs already worked out, the Citation having taken the hits on that.

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