1988 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe review from North America

Fuel pressure regulator went out; easily and cheaply replaced.

This is a great car. It is very sleek looking and has a great aerodynamic profile.

The suspension is well designed; with the Programmable Ride Control (PRC), it *glides* over the bumpiest roads when cruising, and is nice and firm (but not harsh) during maneuvers and performance driving.

The seats are very comfortable with well designed headrests and bolsters. With 8-way adjustment, anyone can find the adjust the seat to suit himself perfectly.

The car is very tight and the interior is quiet. You'd never guess that this car is built on the same chassis as the creaky POS Mustangs of this era. It is very stable even at high (100+ MPH) speed. The (four wheel anti-lock) brakes will stop this car on a dime, and the anti-lock feature works well despite being a first-generation design. They are just well balanced and great driving cars all around; drive one, and you'll see what I mean.

The premium sound system isn't much by today's standards, but it is outstanding by 1988 standards; most importantly, all the speakers are in the right positions so you can easily upgrade the whole system with modern components and have great sound.

The engine is the good ole 2.3 which is a tried and true, bulletproof design. It has good power in stock form and a few easy and cheap mods can beef it up significantly. These cars are rated to run 16's in the 1/4 in stock form, but it's trivial to get one into the 14s, and 13s are not tough either. It doesn't take much work to get one to run with (and beat) 5.0s. While some of the electronics and gadgets may give you problems, the base engine is sound and will easily go 300,000+ miles (no joke) without major work.

The turbos are not problematic as some may lead you to believe; they work fine forever as long as long as you follow the cooldown procedures and oil change intervals described in the owner's manual. Simply put, after a hard drive, allow the engine to idle for a couple minutes to cool the oil down so it doesn't coke and clog up the turbo oil supply line, and change the oil at regular intervals using only high quality oil.

The manual transmission is the venerable T5, which won't give you any problems. The plastic hydraulic clutch line can be problematic and leaky; luckily parts are readily available to swap this over to a cable linkage. The automatic transmission can be problematic. If yours is in good shape, my advice is to install a shift kit to firm up the shifts a bit and increase transmission life.

These cars have a lot of gadgets. When well maintained, they are wonderful cars. When poorly maintained, they can be a nightmare. Be conscious of this when purchasing one. Avoid TCs with mechanical problems, especially ABS as the parts for this old system are very difficult to find and expensive. Spend the extra cash to get a super clean, well taken care of car--you won't regret it. On the flip side, this is one of those rare cars where it's actually worth fixing if you run into a high dollar repair, because it's just such a wonderful car.

In summary, these are great cars, especially if you are mechanically inclined and can fix the little oddities that come with owning a 25 year old car that has more gadgets than the space shuttle.