Good morning! For your Friday edition of Shitbox Showdown, we’re rounding out the week with a pair of brown sedans. They have a surprising amount in common, but come from opposite sides of the world.
I didn’t really need to look at the vote tally from yesterday to know which car won. I knew it was going to be the Family Truckster. I mean, the van had pink shag carpeting underneath a chemical toilet. Nobody wants that in their life. It’s a little early in the day, but no sense dragging this one out. The Country Squire wins it by a country mile.
I had forgotten just how truly awful the actual Wagon Queen Family Truckster really was, until I looked up photos of it again. George Barris did a great job of taking an unappealing (to my eye, anyway) car and making it truly hideous. And lest we forget, the same fine folks that brought you the Family Truckster also gave us the finest rental-spec convertible of all time: the Gran Detroit Farm & Country Turbo–though I don’t think we can blame Barris for that one.
A lot of people complain about cars all looking alike these days, and it’s true; I have trouble telling the sea of midsized crossovers apart without looking at the badges. But if you look back at cars from any era, they all looked alike. To demonstrate this point, today we’re going to be looking at a pair of sedans from the malaise era, designed and built by different companies on different continents. They don’t really look all that much alike sitting side-by-side, but there are some eerie similarities. And to make things even weirder, they’re roughly the same color, roughly the same trim level, and have roughly the same mileage. Let’s check them out.
1978 Ford Fairmont – $3,000
Engine/drivetrain: 200 cubic inch overhead valve inline 6, three-speed automatic, RWD
Location: Gettysburg, PA
Odometer reading: 58,000 miles
Operational status: Runs and drives well
Here it is, the one that started it all, the very first Fox-body car: the 1978 Ford Fairmont. Yep, before there was the Mustang GT, or the Lincoln LSC, there was this boxy thing. It may not be sexy, but compared to the Falcon-based Granada that it replaced, the Fairmont was pretty high-tech for the time: McPherson strut front suspension, a four-link rear axle, and rack-and-pinion steering were all part of the Fox platform from the beginning.
Less new were the Fairmont’s engine offerings. The standard engine was the 2.3 liter four from the Pinto; one step up was this 200 cubic inch inline-six, whose design dates all the way back to 1960. By 1978, it was choked within an inch of its life by emissions equipment, but it’s still a sturdy, reliable engine. This one is backed by Ford’s equally sturdy C4 automatic transmission, and both are in fine shape, according to the seller.
The Fairmont’s interior features something never seen in any Mustang GT or Lincoln LSC: a vinyl bench seat and a column-mounted shifter. Build quality wasn’t Ford’s strong suit in the late 1970s, but this one doesn’t look terrible: the horn button (at least I think it’s the horn button) appears to have fallen off, and the top of the dash is pretty ratty, but the upholstery looks fine. I mean, for tan vinyl.
Fairmonts never were fancy cars, but this one looks especially plain: it has dog-dish hubcaps, and no exterior trim at all. It looks for all the world like a government-spec sedan, and in fact when I saw it posted on Facebook, someone mentioned that it reminded them of the cars in the excellent crime drama Mindhunter. This one looks clean enough to use as set dressing in that show–as long as you only shoot it from certain angles. It does have a couple blemishes here and there.
1981 Mazda 626 LX – $3,400
Engine/drivetrain: 2.0-liter overhead cam inline 4, three-speed automatic, RWD
Location: Ocoee, FL
Odometer reading: 57,000 miles
Operational status: Runs and drives well
And here we have another four-door sedan, also with McPherson struts in front and a coil-sprung solid rear axle, also with an inline engine and an automatic transmission – only this one comes from Japan, courtesy of Mazda. This is the 626, known as the Mazda Capella in its homeland. It replaced the 616/618 and rotary-powered RX-2 here in the US, but the 626 was never offered with a rotary.
In fact, in the US, only one engine was offered, a single overhead cam inline-four displacing 2.0 liters. I had this same engine in a B2000 pickup, and I can practically hear the sewing-machine tick of the valvetrain looking at this photo. The seller says this one runs and drives well, but that’s about all we get. Facebook Marketplace sellers aren’t the most verbose lot, I’ve noticed.
That engine, unfortunately, powers the rear wheels through a three-speed automatic, which should be illegal in a Mazda sedan. But I suppose it’s the pampered low-mileage automatic versions of these old cars that survive, so maybe we should be thankful to that sloppy, slushy box of boring. As wrong as that dumb T-handle looks sticking out of the center console, the rest of the interior is in decent shape. There are some cracks in the dashboard, and there’s no way of knowing what’s under the seat covers, but for 43 years old, it looks good.
The outside looks clean as well; the black rubber five-mile-per-hour bumpers are faded, but it’s undamaged and shiny. The biggest problem is that it’s boring, which is something I never thought I’d say about a Mazda sedan.
And there they are, two cars that come from opposite directions and arrive at more or less the same place. Neither one is what you’d call exciting, but by virtue of being old and now rare, they’re fun to see. Fun to own? Well, that’s a different story. But if you were to choose one, maybe with an eye towards making it more fun, which one would it be? And how would you spice it up? Discuss it in the comments, and I’ll see you all next week.
(Image credits: Facebook Marketplace sellers)
The post Strikingly Similar, But Completely Different: 1978 Ford Fairmont vs 1981 Mazda 626 appeared first on The Autopian.
