Ford Sierra

I once heard Clarkson say on Top Gear that these days there are no bad cars. I tend to agree, there are cars you like and some you don't, but generally they are not actually bad. This however is an exception.

My experience of the Sierra says that it was a bad car. I had one of the face-lift ones with the slot grille and the more shaped headlamps. It was a red 2.0 litre GL on an E plate (1989?). It was my company car in the years when I covered 30,000+ miles a year on the motorways of the North West of England as a Dorothy Perkins Area Manager, a job I did for 12 years. Most of the time I chose Cavaliers for my company car and they were excellent, 100% reliable, fast, fun to drive and good for 100,000 miles, I did more than a third of a million miles in Cavaliers without any trouble at all. One time though I was a bit bored with Cavaliers and decided to try the competition, big mistake.

The Sierra was just a re-bodied Cortina, and the Cortina while excellent for its day, was not a car for the 90s. The two litre four cylinder Pinto engine was old and felt like it, the chassis was a nightmare, lethal on corners and unstable in a straight line. The seats felt big and comfortable for the first 20 minutes or so after which they broke your back. The dashboard design was so bad that I had to have an extra warning light fitted because you couldn't see the turn indicator light, it was obscured by the steering wheel and to finish the picture it was spectacularly unreliable. The local Ford dealer came to hate me I took it back so often. My company fleet manager used to save budget by making us keep cars well over the mileage limit. This one was changed the day it was due, to my great relief I got back into a Cavalier

The Corgi was released in 1982 under model number 299 to coincide with the launch of the 1:1 car by Ford, the first boxes were promotional for the model with Ford logos and there are two versions of the box - I've called them 'Ford' and 'Sierra' below. There are a number of colours around: brown, metallic blue, metallic turquoise, red, silver & yellow. All seem to be of similar value. The model continued well after the Mettoy demise and I've included a range of versions below.