The Ford Escort 1.6Si I am reviewing is a 1996 three-door model.

The car is distinguished from models such as the LX by the standard presence of a body-coloured front spoiler with fog lamps, a honeycomb front grille, a rear tailgate spoiler, sports seats, leather-trimmed steering wheel and white-backed instruments. Later models also had standard five-spoke alloy wheels, but mine was fitted with a set of fairly dull Ford trims. The spoilers, grille and alloy wheels were also available as options on most other Escorts, making the Si potentially not much of a stand-out. It also used the same 1.6-litre, 16-valve engine as other models, so performance was identical, although suspension was slightly tuned for sharper handling, but harder ride. In the Escort range, it sat between the LX and Ghia in terms of standard equipment and cost.

When I purchased the car in April 2000, it had done 45,000 miles in about four years. When the car prematurely went to the scrapyard in the sky in January 2002, thanks to some mind-boggling vandalism / opportunist entrepreneurism, it had covered around 67,000 miles if memory serves me!

Slightly embarrasingly, the Ford Escort "featured" on the BBC2 quiz show, Petrolhead's blind parking challenge, was the very same model...

Driving

A reasonable drive with slightly stiffened suspension compared to the Escort LX and Ghia models, giving fairly sharp handling. This was at the expense of ride comfort, which was quite harsh over bumps. Steering felt reasonably precise - better than a Golf but not a patch on a 306 or the later Focus.

The engine is a 16-valve Zetec unit and doesn't generate maximum torque until 4000rpm, meaning that extracting highest acceleration (or for that matter reasonable progress up a steep hill with a full passenger load) required quite high revs. Below about 3000rpm, acceleration was rather underwhelming. Unfortunately, although the engine was quiet and refined at low revs, it became rather thrashy at higher revs, making acceleration a noisy experience too.

Comfort

One of the best assets of the Si was its front seats. Very supportive, thanks to a good range of positions (including front-back tilt of the whole seat allowing you to really sit "in" it), a long seat cushion supporting the upper legs almost to the knees, a seat back that wraps slightly around the shoulders (unique to this and other sporty Fords), and a firmness that was not too hard and not too soft. At the time I owned this car, I drove a variety of other cars for work, including almost every Volkswagen between a 1.0 Polo and a 2.8V6 Passat - the Escort had the best seats of the lot and is probably the one item I miss the most from it!

Headroom and legroom were adequate, although legroom would be tight for tall people in both front and rear seats. In comparison, my 306 is tighter on headroom but much better for legroom.

The boot is very large and the rear seat can fold flat, with a 60:40 split. I only actually remember filling the car on one occasion despite several attempts!

The lack of standard aircon and quite low angle of front and rear windows meant that the car is difficult to cool in hot weather. Some models do have aircon fitted, and it would be worth seeking one of these out.

The car doesn't have too many luxury items: electric front windows, a manual slide/tilt sunroof and a "Quickclear" front windscreen are about it. The Quickclear screen was extremely effective at deicing or demisting the screen within a minute or two - you could be guaranteed to drive off with a perfectly clear windscreen every morning with no effort other than pushing a button. However, you could really hear the engine struggle to idle while the screen was heating, suggesting a lot of power was consumed, not to mention fuel just when the engine was running cold and inefficiently. If I'd needed to replace it, costs would also have been a lot higher than a normal windscreen too; but the convenience and safety factor of a guaranteed rapidly cleared screen outweighed all this for me. A shame such a feature is not more widely available.

Quality and Reliability

There were few reliability problems I had. The most significant was probably needing to replace the front brake discs twice in the 1.5 years and 20,000 miles I had the car for. These also continuously squeaked apart from the first 100 or so miles after each change. Seeing as I have not had to change the brakes at all in my 306, which has covered over 60,000 miles in my hands, I think I can safely put this down to the Escort's brake quality rather than my driving habits! I have heard similar stories from other Escort owners.

A slightly annoying quality issue was a rattle from the passenger's side floor of the car. The cause was never traced but it rattled at the same volume from the day I test drove it to the last day I had it. I even remember the rattle clearly during the test drive and saying "what's that rattle?" to the salesman, who said "what rattle?", despite the blatant noise. Anyway, it was otherwise fine and was getting a lot of admiring looks in the car supermarket (Carland at Lakeside) parked next to the entrance, including from me - so I was pretty proud, but nervous as it was my first "proper" car, to be driving it away later!

The standard-fit tape player was typically good at chewing tapes and playing them with a slight "fuzziness" in one direction but not the other. However, sound quality was excellent from the standard speakers, especially when I bought a portable CD player and cassette adaptor. Radio reception was also very good, with the RDS function quick to change the tuning to the best available signal for a station.

Safety

The Escort is getting quite old now, so is a bit behind on today's safety features. Mine had no ABS, only a driver's airbag, no headrests for the rear passengers, and only a lap-belt for the middle seat. Some of the higher spec or newer Escorts do have some of these features however, and ABS was optional on the Si, Ford being a pioneer of the system (remember the old advert with the Ford steering around a tractor that pulled out in front of it?), although being surprisingly slow to fit it as standard on many of their cars.

The Escort achieved a poor two stars in the NCAP crash test; in comparison the Focus scored four stars.

Security

Standard equipment on this model includes central locking, deadlocks, an alarm and an immobiliser, which works in conjunction with a coded key. Replacing keys would be quite expensive (not just a case of getting a new one cut in the high street), but replacing the "red key" used for programming new keys would be very heavy on the pockets if lost.

The alarm (effectively the car horn) is activated by opening a door, boot or bonnet without unlocking the door first with a key. There was no motion sensing activation in this car, so it wouldn't activate when it's windy, but also not if the window was smashed and no door was opened.

The deadlocks are activated by turning the key in the door in each direction before removing it. During the vandalism attack on the car (carried out by "professional" car thieves who removed several large body panels, resulting in the car being written off), these proved sufficiently robust that the locks needed to be punched out, despite attempts to get in by breaking the window. Given the nature of the theft and the obvious determination of the thieves, I didn't really think the Ford's security could be blamed - I actually felt like I'd had a pretty secure car!

The stereo is unique to Ford (although it is used in several models of Ford so was probably fittable in about 20% of cars on the road!). It could be disabled by removing part of the control panel, which left a red, blinking LED.

Running costs

The car didn't require a lot of expensive part replacement, aside from the front brake discs mentioned earlier. It was also necessary to replace an emissions sensor to enable the car to pass an MOT, the main cost involved being in tracing the problem.

Insurance was a little high at group eight, considering the performance is identical to a 1.6LX which was group six. This was somewhat galling when I realised that many LXs had the same features as the Si fitted as options so were all but identical (except for probably the white deals - big deal - and the nice seats - good but probably not worthy of two insurance groups...). I have checked more recently however, and the insurance cost compared to other similar cars, seems to have reduced somewhat (taking account of increased age, etc). It is now likely to be around 10% cheaper to insure than a new Ford Focus 1.8 Zetec, which has a lower insurance group rating, but is about 20% more than the equivalent Peugeot 306 1.6XS (IG 5).

Fuel consumption typically averaged 35mpg, which is reasonable, but not great. As you do have to stretch the engine to get the most performance, this car is also less economical to drive quickly than some other similar cars.

Recommended to potential buyers?

Although it was a nice car to own, having subsequently owned a Peugeot 306, I would recommend that instead for a small family car of this age, despite the Escort feeling like a more modern car in some ways. For cars of S-reg onwards, a Ford Focus is likely to be even better than the 306, combining modern design with excellent driving characteristics, and there is certainly no reason to choose an S-reg Escort over an S-reg Focus!