This Practically New 1994 Ford Escort On Bring A Trailer Is A Blast To My Past

While SUVs were growing in popularity in the 1990s, economy cars were still a popular way to get around, especially for broke people like me right after college. Not many survive today since they were made to be disposable appliances, but this 1994 Ford Escort LX on Bring a Trailer is a wonderfully preserved example with just 2,300 original miles. It’s also a blast to my past, since I owned a 1995 Mercury Tracer, which differed from the Escort only in badging and front-end body parts, in the same cool Calypso Green Metallic color for several years.

The second generation of the Escort/Tracer ran from 1991 through 1996. It’s a prime example of Ford’s partnership with Mazda at the time, as the Protege was also nearly identical. The sporty Escort GT even used Mazda’s BP engine, which also powered the Miata at the time. This LX example made do with the standard engine, a 1.9-liter Ford inline-4 that made 88 horsepower and 108 pound-feet of torque. These were small numbers even back then. Pulling out of my apartment into heavy, fast-moving traffic on Route 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts, was challenging, to say the least.

While the Escort had traditionally been a hatchback or wagon, sedan versions became available around this time, likely due to its shared DNA with the Mazda Protege. (The Tracer was never sold as a hatchback in its second generation. The first-generation Tracer was a rebadged Mazda 323 hatchback, so the upscale Mercury brand might have been trying to distance itself from that.) The trunk was large for a car this small, and its boxy shape made it quite usable. I took many road trips without wishing for more space, even after installing a crummy, cheap subwoofer from Sears because I thought it was cool.

The interior had everything you needed and nothing you didn’t. The gauge cluster was simple, with only a speedometer, tach, fuel, and temperature gauges. I had cruise control buttons on the steering wheel (this Escort does not), basic but effective climate controls, and a factory tape deck until I installed a Blaupunkt myself. The cupholders weren’t nearly deep enough to get a grip on my drink, resulting in big spills around turns if I didn’t hold it. That probably never happened in this Escort, whose interior is spotless and perfectly preserved.

The 1990s were a completely absurd time for seat belts. Manufacturers were being dragged, kicking and screaming, into installing airbags. Automatic seat belts were a stopgap measure that (poorly) fulfilled the passive safety restraint requirement until airbags were absolutely required in 1997. My friends and I called these “decapitation belts” because they always seemed to move the shoulder belt in your way at the worst possible time, especially if you had long hair. This 1994 Escort was a transition year with automatic seat belts plus a driver’s airbag. My 1995 Tracer was even stranger, with a redesigned dashboard that ditched the storage cubby and added a passenger airbag. Yes, my Tracer had both dual airbags and the annoying automatic seat belts. Some might say Ford was keeping us extra safe, but I think it just didn’t want to spend extra time and money replacing the automatic seat belts until the next generation.

Cars like this were definitely built to a price point, but my Tracer never felt cheap to me compared to other cars of its time. Despite the Mercury badging, it didn’t have any significant upgrades over the equivalent Escort like this one. Yet these were still cars that you bought, used up, and sent to the junkyard. They weren’t built to last 30 years, yet miraculously, this one has. Yet again, Bring a Trailer has become a low-mileage used car lot. But I think, as the great Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones, Jr. would say, “It belongs in a museum.”