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[CortinaD]

CORTINA TE: Don’t expect miracles

This article was typed and submitted by Matthew Woolard.

Source: Wheels July , 1977

The men from Ford reckon that this car - the Cortina TE - is the one which is going to show the General, Datsun and Toyota how it’s done in the medium car market. If the game were all styling and options they could be right. But durability and road behavior play big roles in car sales and Cortinas of past years have had problems in these areas. The TE, which has the same old components to work with, will have to work hard for its compliments…


"IT"LL BE a car", says Fred Bloom, Ford Australia’s chief engineer, of the new TE Cortina which will make its appearance in local showrooms just days after you read this.

If that’s true, then legions of Ford fans will smile and be glad because to enthusiasts of reliability and durability, sophistication and quality the previous two Cortinas to which the new TE is related - the TC and TD - weren’t cars at all. They were disappointments and sometimes disasters; they were crude in coping with an Australian car’s staple diet - bumps - and sometimes they seemed to be bottomless currency consumers.

Now, if Ford’s men are to be believed, the TE Cortina is arriving to change all that. Out there at Broadmeadows they REALLY BELIEVE the TE is going to be a good car - even the guys who in times past were prepared to admit off the record that the middle-sized Ford wasn’t all it might have been - wasn’t a lot of what it might have been.

There can be no doubt that Ford Australia needs this car to be a success. Ford has been fairly beaten over the head by GMH’s Torana in the middle-sized sedan market and has also taken a toweling from a lot of the Japanese makes. It’s currently doing OK in the big and the small car sections of the market but there is lots of room for improvement in the middle ranges. In fact it’s fair to say that Ford can never expect supremacy in car sales in this country - except an occasional, fractional kind - until it improves its medium sedan penetration.

So the TE needs to be an especially good car - and Ford has better credentials for making it so than before.

It has the inducements that a large amount of bad Cortina publicity in daily newspapers, TV programs and words-of-mouth can bring to bear and it has the talents of both Uwe Bahnsen and Fred Bloom let loose on the project. Bahnsen, you will remember from past WHEELS stories, is the man largely responsible for turning the lacklustre Escort 1 into the top-selling Escort 2 in Germany, without spending all that much money. Fred Bloom is Ford Australia’s comparatively new chief engineer, a man who understands the special requirements of Australia’s roads and to whom ride and handling and more than just words.

The TE Cortina is a new-looking car with square, clean Teutonic lines to make it look like a Euro-sedan, but its basically the same car as last year’s. Its suspension systems are the same on paper, its internal panels are identical or close to it and the drive-trains offered are not materially altered. The new Cortina’s success, if it has any, will come from the way its familiar hardware has been improved in detail.

You can’t argue with any way it looks. The car is attractive and clean with big glass areas and the same excellent styling touches at which Ford has often showed expertise. There is a comprehensive model range, starting with an "L" and progressing through "GL" to "Ghia". And there is a big range of options.

The "L" is a lot more than a skeletal-sedan equipped for district nurses and bank voucher delivery services. It has equipment which would just a couple of years ago have been noteworthy for middle-to high trim level cars. There are reclining bucket front seats, loop-pile carpeting, through-flow vents with fan boosting for hot days, textile radial ply tyres and quartz halogen driving lights.

The GL gets a radio, a rear window demister, body "mouldings" to make it look like it cost you more money, and interior grab handles and GL wagons get a rear washer/wiper system as standard - that’s an excellent touch.

The Ghia (which replaces the XLE), comes only as a sedan and has a three-speed automatic transmission as standard, a pushbutton radio, cut-pile carpet (not the cheapo old loop pile stuff), an elegant ‘soft feel’ four-spoke steering wheel, a centre console, cloth seat inserts of cashmere/corduroy mix, carpeting on the lower doors, a prismatic rear vision mirror, steel belted radial tyres, alloy wheels, a clock, laminated windscreen and tinted glass at all points of the compass, rear inertia belts, delay action windscreen wipers, lights which work when you open the rear doors, the boot or the glovebox, a duel-tone horn, a vanity mirror for mother, full instrumentation and pockets behind the front bucket seats.

On top of that there are options. In your Ghia you can have a stereo tape/radio, a child safety harness or a child seat (or both presumably) but you can’t get factory air just yet. Since factory air has been available in a Torana for moons, Ford is working pretty hard to get it on the sheet. You can also have power steering with a six-cylinder engine or one of two towing kits (they vary according to the weight of the towed object). The towing kit includes heavy duty suspension option as well as the actual machinery of towing - the bar and wiring.

And just to bore you more with options facts, for your GL Cortina Ford offers a number of option "packs" - a "comfort and convenience" one, a "luxury" one and a taxi pack. The comfort pack has external mirrors both sides (the right hand one adjustable by remote control) plus cloth trim for the seats and inertia reel rear belts. The luxury pack offers the same gear as the comfort pack except that the trim is houndstooth and also throws in a stereo tape player, sunroof, driving lights and chrome roof rack on the wagons.

Any L or GL Cortina can have a Rally pack optioned into it. That gives it the four-spoke steering wheel, steel belted radial tyres, Globe Volante wheels, HD suspension, driving lights, delay-action wipers, black bumper over-riders and a selection of blackouts all over the car, full instruments, a centre console and a limited selection of bright, bright colors. Sick of options? OK.

The Ford Cortina TE has double wishbones and coil springs to suspend it at the front and four-links locating a coil-sprung live axle at the rear. There are anti-roll bars front and rear. Ford has done a lot of proving work on geometry and suspension rates in Europe. Ford Australia has spent a lot of time checking and altering that work for our special conditions. The big question - and there is considerably more at stake than $64,000 - is whether the suspension’s troubles have been cured without fundamental re-design. English road-testers are still critical of the car’s behavior when it strikes bumps in mid-corner, though they say it is well-finished, attractive and apparently reliable. Ford Australia says a major point of criticism of past Cortinas, that the car wasn’t properly engineered to take the heavy and torquey 3.3 and four-litre sixes has been overcome. The car now IS engineered to take them.

We have to stress that test cars weren’t available at the time of writing, but it seems an extravagant claim that the car has been built to take the sixes. The fact is that the major design is European where either a V6 or a two-litre four were intended for the car. The use of these bigger straight sixes in Australia can only be regarded as "shoe-horning", no matter how professionally done or in what volume. We may have to eat these words when we drive the car - and we hope we do - but truthfully, it’s not very likely.

Ford is in two minds about how to sell the Cortina. It was heading full speed towards a program of selling on the Bahnsen/Euro-sedan platform until it found that this pitch held little water with buyers under 35 - most of whom wanted to hear that the car was Japanese. It now seems likely that for all the Teutonic square shoulders of the car, Ford will sell it as being "equipped to beat the Japanese" rather than as a Junior BMW.

Look for the TE Cortina to be a good-performing, attractive and modern-looking, acceptably roomy medium sedan with a miraculous range of options and a kind of sporty, aggressive quality that seems to infiltrate all of the Fords built here. Expect it to be better built - the latest Escorts are far better than the ones of a few years ago - but don’t expect miracles in the ride/handling department. Then you won’t be disappointed.