How Can We Tell A Car Is American, 1981 Escort Edition

I suspect that many of you have noticed this: just by looking at a car – even from a distance or through the thick glass of your enclosure in the alien menagerie, or in poor lighting or whatever – you can usually get a pretty good guess as to roughly what part of the world that car came from. Maybe not exactly, but somehow you can usually tell if a car is American or Japanese or European and so on just from the quickest and most perfunctory of glances. How do we do this?

It’s not just one specific detail, but rather a sort of loose set of details, a certain overarching conceptual theme of the car, and that theme seems to carry overtones that are tied to the car’s region of origin. This is one of those things that you more feel than can often clearly enumerate, which is why it fascinates me so.

That said, I think there are some specifics that can be pointed out, and an interesting way to do so is to look at a car that is fundamentally the same everywhere, but has regional differences. These details were different in different periods of time, so let’s take an example from the 1980s, with Ford’s big “world car,” the Escort:

I think you could argue that the Model T was a “world car” decades and decades before the Escort, and the Escort didn’t really start as a “world car.” The Escort was a Ford of Britain car for two generations; this “world car” version was really the third generation Escort for Europe, but a first Escort for America.

And these were everywhere in America at the time, and Ford definitely played up the “world car” angle. Also, yes, that’s Casey Kasem’s voice there, the voice of Shaggy Rogers, a guy who lived in a van with a dog and stopped small-scale real estate scams involving elaborate costumes.

It’s amazing how extinct this generation of Escort is in America today. I haven’t seen one in the wild in decades.

Anyway, let’s look at this car, and how it differed in its European and American guises:

Body-wise and under the skin, these Escorts were quite similar, though none of the body panels are actually shared, which is odd, because they’re really similar. The programs for the Euro and American Escorts started from the same point, but diverged, and that’s where things get interesting and telling, I think.

The CVH inline four-banger engine is shared, and the auto transmission, and the suspensions are the same conceptually, if not parts-wise. These cars are a great example of how the design philosophies of early ’80s Europe and America differed.

Visually, Americans seemed to like chrome and more small details – more trim, a fussier grille, more of everything. European designs tended to favor simplicity and less detail and trim. Same goes for the interiors, too:

I mean look at that; Americans are less afraid of color, which I like, but they also have a strangely overdone steering wheel, complete with what looks like a little coat-of-arms in the center, which is especially strange, considering coats-of-arms are a traditional European affectation.

The Euro gauge clusters are a much more no-nonsense white on black with orange needles, and while the American instruments themselves are similar, they’re in an oddly taupe-colored panel with even more linear details and trim. The American radio has shiny knobs, the dash itself is more upright, the Euro dash has more chunky black toggle switches, and on and on but the point is all of us here could have called out which was ’80s American and which was ’80s Euro in seconds.

We all know these divisions deep down. What I’m less sure of is why.

What is it about American culture at the time that made us want more chromed and detailed cars? Why can I look at the American Escort’s side mirrors and know they’re not going to show up on a car from Europe? What is it about our national culture that dictates these things?

Are Europeans more likely to see cars with somewhat sporting pretentions? Does this have anything to do with the Puritans? Does it mean anything that, generally, the European sort of look “won,” and now more cars feel like they fit in that category?

I’m not certain. There’s more here I want to investigate, but now isn’t the time. But I’ll think about it, and I’ll read your comments, and maybe we can get closer to a Unified Automotive Sociocultural Design Theory!