Ford Aspire
All you really need to know about the Ford Aspire is that the Enterprise Rent-a-Car branch at which my wife worked years ago--an establishment not exactly filled with sleek and exotic machinery--held the Aspire in such ignominious regard that the staff broke the name into two sylables and added an extra "s" to the name. Yes, because the car drove like, well, butt. Even so, the car's nickname was nowhere near as obscene as the car itself.
I've spent a lot of time talking up small, cheap, light hatchbacks, but one must draw the line somewhere. You know it's bad when the Aspire was nowhere near as sleek or exotic as its fierce mid-1990s competitor, the Geo Metro. Try to wrap your mind around that for a moment.
Manufactured by Kia a decade before the company fixed its woeful quality problems, the Aspire did nothing to enhance Ford's small-car reputation. The Aspire had an incredibly underpowered 1.3-liter 4-cylinder engine, which meant the Aspire had great difficulty reaching highway speeds and climbing steep hills.
Once Aspires hit the 100,000-mile mark, the engine has a tendency to sound as if it had gravel in the combustion chamber. I'm not sure if it's a design defect or poor maintenance caused by the car's disposable aura--probably both--but every Aspire that I've heard in the past few years has souded as if it's running completely without lubrication.
Likewise, the build quality was such that the sheet metal could be dimpled and molded simply with one's thumb and index finger. The Aspire was also replete with all of the electronic malfunctions and poor interior fit-and-finish typical of underengineered and overcomplex compact cars in the mid-1990s.
I once saw an Aspire for-sale listing that so inspired me that I archived the text for safe-keeping. The attempts to build excitement are rich in their irony:"This is a beautiful 1994 Ford Aspire Hatchback that was adult owned and maintained. This is by no means your typical vehicle. Its senior owner maintained this beauty consistently in a super-meticulous manner ... this vehicle has all of the attributes you could want in a vehicle ... Inside and out, this is an overall real beauty. The engine is very powerful and idles super smoothly."
Big Chris on July 03, 2008 at 12:02 PM
I think Ford should go back into making these cars and sell them as a three pack. Market them as the first disposable car. They could have commercials of guys jumping them over things, running into things, doing all things Jackass with them, and the tag line could be - "Who cares? We've got another one."
Big Chris
Turbodave on July 03, 2008 at 01:42 PM
The Ford Aspire was a warmed over version of the previous boxy and very stubby Ford Festiva. Before Kia built the Festiva for Ford, the entire design was purchased from Mazda, where the stubby little guy was previously known as the Mazda 121. So, you had an old and outdated hand-me-down Japanese design built by a quality-challenged Korean manufacturer for a US company not smart enough to build or import its own really quite good European products for US consumers.
Jane on July 03, 2008 at 04:37 PM
It is so ungainly looking. You can see the faintest hint of "cute little car" in there, but its like some sad bedraggled unhealthy mongrel pulled from the pound when it should just have been put down. It's a really sad little car. The profile view is particularly unfortunate. The wide spread rear wheels and narrow from track are all to evident, and spell massive under-steer.
Ford - WTF? Ford has been able to pull in cheap tinny little cars that were a heck of a lot of fun. Anyone remember the Fiesta? That was a complete box - but it was pretty quick for its time and from accounts I've read it handled pretty well. It was referred to a "a poor man's rabbit". The Fiesta was replaced by the Festiva. Then the Aspire. Oh God - Even the name just summons forth a sad lack of any kind of future.
It's too bad that there is not some single responsible person that you could walk up to, grab by the scruff of the neck, and shake. Some one you could yell at and say "NO! NO! Don't make that thing! We don't need that crap - we don't need more junk on the roads".
Brian on July 04, 2008 at 02:07 AM
Laughs.
AutoCar-Live on July 04, 2008 at 08:51 AM
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David Colborne on July 05, 2008 at 01:45 PM
Ah, the Festiva... the worst part about that car, at least for me, wasn't the build quality. It wasn't the lack of performance. It was that this car was basically the cornerstone of Ford's half-intoxicated attempts at marketing to women by eschewing the entire male demographic. Suddenly, you had the Ford Probe with that girl that did the Spring Long Distance commercials pimping them. You had the gratuitous application of teal and pink on Ford Rangers. Then, you had the Ford Aspire, where they just conceded that no straight man would ever buy one of these things, so they'll just deck it out in as much "female" gear as possible and hope women will actually be stupid enough to buy them.
Because, y'know, if there's one thing anybody should have learned from International, it's that eschewing half of a population is always a good idea.
David Colborne on July 05, 2008 at 01:45 PM
Gah! I meant the Aspire. Why did I say Festiva? That car actually wasn't half bad...
Johan Amedeus Metesky on July 05, 2008 at 10:39 PM
My ex and I ended up with an Aspire rental car when our minivan was in the shop. I remember calling it "a horrid little ratbox, they should call it the Expire, as in "he expired"". The only redeeming value was the fact that the A/C blew cold.
rob the SVX guy on July 06, 2008 at 09:09 AM
I had the 'pleasure' of driving a few of these before, in fact, they were some of my first. You see, the driving school I went to when I was around 15 to 16 used Aspires, and it was absolutely awful. The part that boggled my mind was that there was a obviously sharp piece of metal near the gas pedal that sliced into my shoe, leaving a gash that went straight through the shoe's toe leather. I'm only glad that my foot wasn't right near that part, and that I was never in an accident. I could only imagine what it would do if you braced yourself against it. For the record, I have fairly large feet, and as others have mentioned, this car was marketed toward women. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
Mochi Mochi on July 06, 2008 at 03:27 PM
This is one of those cars that has "incompetent" or "bad" design written all over it. This is a classic case where materials, energy, and capital, are wasted in manufacturing a car that really should not have been built.
Like it or not the Tata Nano ( http://news.cnet.com/2300-11389_3-6225465-4.html?tag=ne.gall.pg ) makes the most of materials and technology. Sure the Nano gets off a little easier than a car sold in the US. Sure we have no idea about the reliability of the Nano. Sure the Nano is odd looking. But it's also somewhere in the range of $2500-$4000 and it looks no worse than your average Smart Car.
I'm not going to rail against the car, the design team, or the corporate structure that made cause the Aspire to be the way it is. I'm just going to say that it should not have happened at all.
Part of "Design" is problem solving. This is a design that solves no problems instead it creates them. That's a problem. Honestly I could take a go-kart, an engine and transmission from a honda C90 (or 50), some bending plywood, and a little fiber glass and in a week's time I'd have a better car than the Aspire.
Mochi Mochi on July 06, 2008 at 09:35 PM
What to do with your hatefully ultra-bland road vehicle. Inspiration from our friends at Top Gear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XraeBDMm2PM&NR=1
OldCarGuy on July 07, 2008 at 06:47 AM
They have way too much fun over there at Top Gear! Mochi, I trust you've seen what they did to the Toyota Hilux pickup truck.
Chris Hafner on July 07, 2008 at 11:01 AM
Top Gear has to be one of the best shows on today. That Toyota truck series is fantastic, OCG, thanks for bringing it up. The series:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrk6vsb77xk
Part 2a: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc4Ksz3nHM
Part 2b: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfZDtC9kjVk
Rob the SVX guy on July 07, 2008 at 11:56 AM
You know.. I really hated TG for a while, because of that Toyota truck thing. They never attacked the engine compartment, and honestly, I think MOST vehicles would survive about as well as it did given the same circumstances. Toyota fans of course, would never admit this.
Chris Hafner on July 07, 2008 at 12:03 PM
Rob the SVX Guy: "They never attacked the engine compartment"
When I watched it at the time I thought the same thing - backing it into walls, lighting the bed on fire and that sort of thing isn't likely to really cause any other car to stop running. But some of the other stuff was pretty rugged - submerging it in seawater, for instance, dropping it from a great height, then buckling it into the demolished building - that's some pretty brutal punishment. I don't think the Toyota really survived the demolished building - I think breaking the frame counts as breaking the vehicle - but the fact that it would drive, even slowly, after all that is pretty remarkable.
منتدى كوره on July 08, 2008 at 03:34 AM
thank you .
Buster on July 09, 2008 at 01:08 PM
As a current owner of a '95 Aspire, I must add the following :
Hey! I resemble those remarks!
And while we are at it, I will admit my secret shame - I let my wife talk me into trading in a Camry on it. Wait for it to sink in...
A. Camry. For. An. Aspire. A new Aspire.
There you have it. My most horrible secret laid bare for all the world. Oh, the shame and humiliation! Believe me, there is no human alive who is more anxious for the invention of time travel than me. I *WILL* go back and kick my own ass, and hang the consequences, temporal parodoxes, and the end of life as we know it throughout the galaxy.
It's a small price to pay, I should think.
Chris Hafner on July 10, 2008 at 03:08 PM
As always happens after I write up a car, I've been seeing Aspires everywhere. Remarkably, every single one looks as if it's being held together by bailing wire. All are battered, all are faded - they look as if they've been toiling in the countryside for a few decades.
One of them, entertainingly, had a piece of white tape covering the "Aspire" badge on the rear. I'm not sure why, unless the driver was ashamed.
Buster, I'm so sorry.
Rob the SVX guy on July 11, 2008 at 08:42 AM
Buster... if it's any consolation, it's not like a camry is much more exciting. In fact, I'd say the Aspire, even though it's a horrible thing, is more interesting than a Camry. :|
Buster on July 11, 2008 at 01:58 PM
Oh, the shame is still on me -
I omitted one little detail about the Camry. It was a four-banger with a *manual* transmission. Oh, trust me. The Camry with a manual was quite a bit more potent beast than the automatic. While it was not in the Corvette class, it still had real grunt in the low-down and more-than-decent handling thanks to shedding a hundred-or-so pounds of auto tranny foofooraw in the front.
And they were rare. Oh, God - that manual Camry was harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa. Or Callista Flockhart turned sideways. Whichever. Most Camry geeks don't even know Toyota ever made a manual-throw Camry, but I had one. And I let it slip away ... (insert sobbing sounds here)
Yep. The universe can implode for all I care, I am still going back to kick my own ass ... Right after a side trip to kick my ass for getting rid of my '75 AMC Gremlin with the 232 Straight Six.
suedenim on July 14, 2008 at 02:07 PM
Whenever I saw one of these, I started thinking about the name, and how it suggests the owner "aspires" to get a real car one day.
Charles on July 16, 2008 at 10:18 PM
Actually for the first seven years I owned my 1995 Aspine (the years when it was actually running)it amazed me in that it lived up to the one demand I place on a car...
I could fit into it.
See, I'm six-feet-five inches tall, a disproportionate amount of it leg. Obviously the one thing they told the designer to do with the interior was "needs to fit freaky American Giraffe." A friend of mine who's six-two and more proportionate sat with his head mashed into the ceiling, but he didn't even bother to adjust the passenger seat, which was pushed forward so his brother could fit in the back.
Mind you, I've never driven any vehicle that was more terrifying in the snow and ice ("this Goddamned thing is front wheel drive, why am I wondering if I'll get home alive?") and a year after I had the transmission and the distributor repaired, they both failed in one horrible trip home from work, with parts of the clutch actually falling into the floor space. I guess it was worth the money, for as long as it lasted, and bless the wretched thing, it got me home safely that day before failing utterly.
Charles on July 16, 2008 at 10:22 PM
(sigh) Yes, I own the world's only 1995 Forb Aspine. Made by Gia.
Charles on July 16, 2008 at 10:41 PM
Remember those adds for the introduction of the Geo Metro, with little Harlan Ellison standing beside the car? The should have hired me to stand beside the Aspire: "Can you believe this? I can actually fit into this thing and comfortably drive it!" The Metro was my other choice at the time, but I just couldn't handle it in the test drives without banging my knees on something. For the first month with the Aspire, I couldn't get over the weird impression that I was reaching way down under my right knee to shift (I was, actually, I just got over it.)
S.A.C. on July 21, 2008 at 08:30 PM
We love ours. We have put 100,000 miles on it, bought it at 34,000, still going strong. It was even t-boned by an SUV and still works.