I bought this when the company offered an alternative to the company car scheme. It was 4 years old,
and one fifth of its new price when I bought it. I loved it. It was the first automatic I had ever
owned, and combined with the big V6 engine, made for lazy cruising about. It was like driving about
in your favourite comfiest armchair. It could pick up its crinoline skirts and hoon along though,
much to the surprise of several people in hot hatches and sports cars, over the years.
I bought it with 56,000 miles, and got it to 185,000 miles over 5 years before I sold it. In that time, I serviced it and repaired it myself, and it only saw a garage for an exhaust, tyres and one accident repair - it took a long time to recover from the accident repair, as Ford dealers, apparently, are not that good at fixing cars like Fords, which are strangers to them. The tyre and exhaust episode is explained in greater detail here.
When I say it was reliable, it did experience some "wear and tear" over that mileage. I had to replace:
Front brake disks (twice)
Front brake pads (about 5 times)
Rear brake calipers (each side)
Handbrake cable
Differential
Front and rear shock absorbers
One driveshaft
Power steering rack
Water pump
One electric window motor
It was the automatic gearbox that gave me the most trouble. A fortnight after I bought it, it lost all "go" and coasted to a stop about a mile from the garage I bought it from. I got it towed in, and they fixed the torque plate (same as a flywheel) for nothing.
About 3 months later, it started missing out 1st gear and starting in 2nd. Then it started forgetting to change into 4th as well, so it was only using 2 gears. I took it to a specialist and they spent a week rebuilding it, for a cost of £Ohyabuggerhowmuch?
I was happy after that. For about 4 months, then 1st gear disappeared again. Then a few days later, 4th went as well. I was even more overjoyed to discover that the repairer had gone out of business for health reasons -ie he was a fat lazy bastard. Lovely.
Another repairer. Another bill for £"Ohbuggeratleastitsnotasmuchasthefirstone". This second repairer pointed out that a lot of the clutches and bands hadn't been renewed, and that some were stamped as having been made in 1986, 5 years older than the car. The car was fine for the 100,000 miles after this second repair though. The cost of these two repairs was truly frightening. The first time, I should have done the "convert to manual" thing that I had done 4 times before, with the Corsairs. This served as a reminder that repairing and servicing the car myself was definitely the best way - every time I have handed a car over to somebody else, they have screwed something up.
One night I was driving home from work after chasing 3 yoofs out of our car park because they looked a bit suspicious. About 2 miles up the road, I was motoring along at 60mph when suddenly there was a loud bang and the view out disappeared and I got covered in glass. The bonnet had blown up over the windscreen (well through it) and I was able to peer under the back of the bonnet until I could get the side window down and get my head out to see where I was going. I stopped in a layby and put the bonnet back down. It was at this stage that I spotted the series of handprints at the front of the bonnet, which I surmised were perhaps not unconnected with the activities of the 3 nice young men I had spoken to earlier.
The bonnet had folded back over the windscreen and roof join, so it had a nice crease across the middle, with the front half sticking up in the way. By jumping on it and bending it over a fence post that was lying about, I managed to get the front down far enough so that I could see over it from the drivers seat, and then fixed it down with a piece of rope.
When I got home got a mobile windscreen repairer out, while I took the bonnet off and jumped on it a bit more, so that it was more or less back in its original shape, albeit covered in dents like that indian car in the Peugeot 206 advert. I drove it like that for over a year till I found a bonnet in decent nick in a scrap yard (although it was black, not blue) and then got it resprayed a couple of months after that.
My co-directors at work made me sell it after that because they said that a 9-year-old Granada wasn't in line with our image. It had to go!
They gave me an Audi A4 Estate though. Which was nice.
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