Why It Was So Hard To Love The Ford ‘CVH’ World-Car Engine From The 1980s, Even Though It Was Pretty Solid

Ford’s Compound Valve-angle Hemispherical (CVH) engine, produced for a quarter of a century, was its world car engine from the ’80s onwards. It lasted the same time period as the American market Ford Escort, and Ford also installed it in various other cars. Designed to provide dependable everyday motoring for compact car drivers, it was among the more disappointing aspects of anything it was mounted in, despite good intentions.

Ford’s first “world car” was to be the 1981 Escort, at first developed under the code name C-Car. Lee Iacocca’s initiative, it brought the European Escort into the futuristic age of front-wheel-drive, a layout which the “Bobcat” Fiesta Mk1, also sold in North America, had already accepted from the get-go. Ford had been building European Escorts since the late 1960s, but those had been rear-wheel-drive and largely similar over the first two generations, and they were beginning to look old next to the Volkswagen Golf. Meanwhile, Ford USA sought to replace the Pinto and the Mercury Bobcat with something sharper looking.

The Escort Lands On Both Shores

The single overhead cam, four cylinder, 1.6-liter CVH (Compound Valve-angle Hemispherical) engine ended up being the only thing shared by the American and European Escorts, as development started around one car and ended with two different cars sharing the name, silhouette, and base engine. Few photos exist of the U.S. and European cars parked next to each other, but I’ve managed to find these ones from the early 1980s.

The CVH name came from the engine’s combustion chamber design, which gave the fuel mixture a swirl that would enable a leaner, cleaner burn. Ford built CVH engines for the American cars in Dearborn, while the European cars got their engines from Wales in the UK.

Road tests and comparison tests of the time noted the engine’s lack of refinement compared to the competition, with Car and Driver calling it “very slow” and making comparisons to a weed eater:

Ford went to a lot of trouble with the hardware parts of this engine—an aluminum head, an electron-beam-welded intake manifold, a crossflow port arrangement with an­gled valves and fully machined combus­tion chambers—but then tried to get by without the sophisticated on-board computers that all GM and many Chrys­ler models are using to optimize fuel flow, spark advance, EGR, and the like. The results have been nearly disastrous. The Escort does reasonably well in economy—30 mpg EPA with a four-­speed manual transmission and a short options list—but the sacrifices necessary to get economy and meet emissions without the aid of a computer have killed performance dead as a hammer. The car is very slow—zero to sixty in 14.6 seconds, standing quarter-mile in 19.4 seconds at 69 mph. This is more leisurely performance than even the Honda Accord’s, which typically brings up the rear in small-car acceleration.

Moreover, the Escort labors mightily to attain whatever speed it can. Under hard acceleration, the engine climbs through several stages of roar—like a Weed Eater progressing from quack grass through the petunia patch and into a stand of maple saplings. This mastication is accompanied by vigorous buzzings transmitted up through your leg by the accelerator. The sound-level meter reports 89 dBA at the driver’s ear during such a forced march, and that is louder than almost any other small car in the class

Yet here’s the contradiction. We think Mr. and Mrs. America will find the Es­cort a quiet car. For one thing, they won’t run it to 50 mph in second gear in fits of enthusiastic driving. And that sort of flat-out operation is the only circum­stance in which it is really noisy. Every­day driving for everyday citizens con­sists mostly of idling at traffic lights and constant-speed cruising at speeds below 65 mph. Here the Escort is quieter than most of the competition. And this, in turn, means that one of the main annoy­ances associated with travel in small cars—the auditory assault factor—just isn’t a problem in an Escort.

[Ed Note: It seems NVH was an issue with American automakers trying to compete with newer, more efficient Japanese overhead cam motors. As I wrote years ago about GM’s Quad-4:

The Quad 4 didn’t have balance shafts, which are shafts built into the engine specifically to offset secondary forces that can yield engine imbalance and thus vibration. It wasn’t the only engine lacking this technology, but it was also fairly large, and this, some thought, was the source of the Quad 4’s refinement problems.

This CVH also reminds me of the Iron Duke — loud, slow, but solid. – DT]

The first-generation American Escort and its Mercury Lynx sibling lasted until the end of the 1980s, as did the European Escort. The American version was facelifted for 1985, with the European car following suit for 1986: the latter in its updated form was called the Mk4 Escort to differentiate it from the earlier, third-generation car, but it was by all means a large facelift. Around this time, the combustion chamber shape was altered from hemispherical to more heart-shaped.

Escorts Go Their Separate Ways, The CVH Continues

When these two cars ended production in the early ‘90s, Escorts went their separate ways: Ford used a Mazda platform, shared with the 323, for its future American market Escorts and Mercury Tracers.

Ford Europe developed a more aerodynamic and Sierra-shaped fifth-generation car, but retained the same engines the old cars had used, alongside more modern Zetec engines. That meant the CVH continued service on both sides of the Atlantic despite the cars already being significantly different. These light blue wagons look superficially the same, but they weren’t on the same platform anymore.

The base Euro Escort ran the pushrod HCS engine, which was introduced in its earliest form in 1959 as the Ford Kent, and would also still be used in the Ford Ka supermini as the Endura-E. When the CVH is considered an improvement, you know you’re using some vintage Ford engines in your 1990s hatchback.

You could get Mazda engines for the American Escort, as the hot GT versions used a 1.8-liter Mazda BP; the European fifth-generation Escort relied on Ford tech and the DOHC engine. European Fords never got any bigger CVHs than 1.8-liter units, but American CVH developments could be as big as 1.9- or 2.0-liter.

The CVH also went into the Ford Sierra in the late ‘80s, replacing the Pinto OHC engine in some markets. This made a lot of people very angry (well, me), and has been widely regarded as a bad move (by me, as well). Context, you ask?

My Personal Beef With The Ford CVH

I bought a Belgian-built 1990 Ford Sierra a little over a decade ago, before my 30s crisis truly hit me. I wanted a cheap rear-wheel-drive car to supplement my cheap front-wheel-drive cars, and I ended up with a very cheap and road-legal, base-model, three-door Sierra with the 1.6-liter CVH and monopoint fuel injection.

The car produced 80 horsepower and 119 Nm (87.8 ft-lbs), and the engine didn’t really rev smoothly, nor did it have good grunt in the lower rev range.

And this is where we again get into the core issue of the CVH: It sounds and feels terrible. Of course, in the Sierra, we’re talking about a compact car engine in a mid-size car; the Merkur XR4Ti, which shared the bodyshell, was classified as a compact in the United States but also had nearly 100 more horsepower than my car. In the Escort and especially the smaller Fiesta, it probably fared better in everyday driving.

As a result, I never really wanted to rev the engine enough to extract any meaningful performance from it, but I also couldn’t rely on low-range power to lug the car along. It did go sideways in a completely acceptable manner on slippery surfaces, but the slow steering also acted as a barrel-washing simulator. You really did have to put an effort into it, and the cockpit was generally full of hands when drifting the Sierra on ice.

I also put some race track miles under its belt at the Ahvenisto track in Finland. The lurchy slide above took a lot of doing.

The gearshift also made it feel like I expected the Sierra-derived P100 pickup to feel, which makes me think I should have simply bought one of those instead: I would have gotten an OHC engine instead, even if I would’ve missed out on the Sierra’s completely fine ride, which the leaf-sprung P100 couldn’t deliver.

The older OHC engine would probably have been far more satisfying, but this dawned on me only after I had bought the car.

After a couple of years, I ended up buying a Miata to get me out of the funk I had driven myself into and sold the Sierra to a friend at a bar. He solved the car’s issues by fitting a three-liter Jaguar S-type V6 in it, which I also felt was the right thing to do. The car still lives; the CVH motor is probably providing reliable service as a boat anchor.

Ford Europe Lets The CVH Go, Ford USA Keeps It

The 1990s European Escort also received a lot of stick in the day for its undesirable powertrains, which were largely rectified by Ford introducing the Zetec line of engines for it and gradually phasing out the CVH, which had been offered in 1.4-liter and 1.6-liter form.

Ford got the Euro Escort quite right during the 1990s, with the “Mk6” brought out in 1995, but the introduction of the Focus in 1998 just showed how fuddy-duddy the Escort had been – enough for Ford to wisely rebrand the successor, even if the company took so long to secure the name that the cars didn’t actually have Focus badges at the 1998 Geneva Motor Show where they were unveiled.

The American Focus, however, retained the CVH as the standard engine, with the solid Zetecs and Duratecs above it, up until 2005. The Focus, again serving as a world car of sorts, was built in Michigan and Mexico as well as Germany and Spain, and it was positioned differently depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on. In the States, it was the cheap hatchback for students that the Escort had been, while in Europe, it gunned for the top of the hotly contested family car segment that increasingly valued driver involvement. Ford also kept building the American Escort as a fleet model alongside, or below the Focus, with the last Escorts leaving the production line in June 2002.

The Euro Escort hadn’t been terrible to drive, but since Ford couldn’t beat Volkswagen’s Golf with interior quality, it had to do it with handling and driveability. For the Focus, this included the engine palette, which had to appeal to drivers who had such gems as the Peugeot 306 to choose from.

The Weird And Wonderful CVH Years

The CVH ended up in some very weird cars as well. It was the only engine choice for the Ford EXP, Ford’s two-seater sports hatchback that was also sold as the Mercury LN7. In the first cars, the CVH was mainly doing its job for fuel efficiency’s sake, which meant as little as 70 horsepower from the 1.6-liter motor. Ford rectified that with a turbocharged version that was sold until 1985. 120 horsepower was certainly a lot better, and the facelifted, 1.9-liter naturally aspirated second-gen EXP could only reach 115 hp for the last cars.

The EXP’s spiritual successor was the Escort ZX2 (1997-2003); while the ZX2 was the final American Escort to be built, it never got the CVH but used a Zetec engine instead.

In one of my favorite vaporwave YouTube clips, a Luxury Elite remix has been set to a Mercury LN7 commercial. It’s extremely cool.

The CVH was also turbocharged for European Escorts, for the RS Turbo, offered in the Mk3 and Mk4 Escorts. Especially the Mk3 RS Turbo, which was only produced in limited numbers, has become a relatively rare and valuable youngtimer classic in the UK. The most expensive one, of course, was the custom black RS Turbo originally owned by Princess Diana. It was auctioned for nearly a million dollars a few years back.

But those weren’t the only sporty cars on the market to have CVH power, as the Reliant Scimitar SS1, a plastic-bodied, Michelotti-designed roadster, was also fitted with a CVH engine – as small as 1.3 liters. You could get the SS1 turbocharged, too, but that meant picking the CA18T engine from the UK-produced Nissan Bluebird Turbo. The above photo shows the facelifted SST version. Note, the T doesn’t stand for Turbo but for William Towns, who redesigned the car.

Caterham and Morgan used the CVH too in their roadsters in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as they were easy to procure from Ford. It was also the UK engine production line that ended up being sold to China, where they put the CVH engine back into service in Chery’s first car, the Fulwin.

The Windcloud, as the name translates, was a carbon copy of the first-generation Seat Toledo, produced using blueprints secured from Volkswagen Group’s parts suppliers instead of Volkswagen itself. Chery eventually developed its own engines, putting the CVH to long-deserved pasture. The Toledo’s Chinese variants were produced up to 2016 through numerous facelifts.

Is The Ford CVH Bad? You Tell Me

Over the years, the CVH’s letters have been said to stand for Considerable Vibration and Harshness instead of Compound Valve-Angle Hemispherical. Even so, it is likely not Ford’s worst engine. At its worst, it was underwhelming, giving the same sort of feeling as some Ford interiors at their cheapest. Over the years, it proved to be a reliable engine if maintained, as skipping the oil change interval on the CVH means it’ll start sludging up, which starves the top end.

Engine builders and tuners favor the CVH for its lightness and general simplicity compared to Ford’s Pinto and Crossflow engines. As a British tuner, David Baker says, “Cam wear is a fact of life with the CVH”, but he notes how cheap oil and infrequent oil changes are often the culprit. Another issue is the later CVH and SPI engines dropping valve seats, but that is exacerbated by overheating.

The often naturally aspirated CVH dates back to the time when fuel efficiency for basic economy cars was done by fiddling with lean burn, valve angles, and combustion chamber shapes, compared to the downsized, one-liter, three-cylinder, turbocharged EcoBoost of recent years. That’s a completely different can of worms, especially with a timing belt swimming in oil; at least the CVH was somewhat simple, relatively reliable, and took forced induction well.

What do you think is Ford’s worst engine? Feel free to sound off in the comments.

Top graphic images: Ford