1988 Ford Escort L review from UK and Ireland

The car had a stuck (closed) rear window when I bought it which I never bothered to fix. Otherwise it was irritatingly hard to wreck.

This was the worst car I have ever owned or driven.

That is not to say that it was badly built (in fact build quality was solid right through even though it was 15 years old when I bought it). Nor do I intend to imply that it was in any way unreliable. Nothing broke in the year I owned it at all, even though its purpose was bought be an "Early Learning Centre" for my wife - and even with grinding gears every time she had to do a maneouvure in it, she couldn't kill it either.

So it both reliable and well built, but niether of these points matter when you consider that it was a terrible car and in my mind a terrible car that's well built isn't really any better than a terrible car that's badly built (at least in the latter case you might kill it or get an excuse to change it).

Let's start from the outside with that hopeless shape, shall we. A "wedge of cheese" hatchback at the back which probably looked very nice on paper (though coupled to an outrageoulsy square front, perhaps not even that) but (the hatchback) was hopeless at what it did. It was too low so the boot was too small and if you leaned inside to pull down the back seats you bashed your head on it.

Of course if you leaned inside you'd see the interior which was as dull as a very dull person on a day they are feeling particularly dull, doubled. Then when you got into it you found that the seats were an inducement to instant backache, in order to reach the pedals you had to have the steering wheel wedged under your chin (and I'm over six foot) and your all round visbility was complete messed up by a stupidly-low angled rear screen and its idiotically thick supports.

However, let's now imagine we've got past this point and turned the thing on. We would find (glory be!) a 1.6 theoritically injected engine which did 0-60 in well under a decade and could accelerate all the way to 91mph (observed) before shaking your already tortured back so violently that your spine shot out of the top of your skull.

Having said that it did corner as well as any cross-channel ferry though the (non-PAS-aided) steering wheel was about as easy to move as a boulder.

Oh and then there were the brakes. These appeared to work in only two ways - a sudden jarring stop, or no braking at all.

So, as I said, a truly terrible car, but well built and reliable - thus suggesting this wasn't a British Leyland style calamity, but that Ford actually designed and built the car this way ON PURPOSE. Incredible.