Am I the only one who is getting 14 mpg and paying $5 a gallon for premium gas right now? Am I the only one to think that small vintage cars like this 1988 Ford Festiva LX 5-speed are going to all of a sudden become hot sellers? The seller has this 35 mpg in “combined driving” car listed here on eBay in Colbert, Washington and the current bid price is $3,527.
I bet that I’m not the only one for either of those things. Some of you get much less than 14 mpg and pay much more than $5 a gallon for gas / diesel / fuel / petrol / whatever you call it. I passed on eBay, Apple, and Amazon stock 20+ years ago like a moron, but I think a decent inflation hedge might be filling a pole building full of the nicest vintage, somewhat-modern small cars that you can find and this would be one of them for me.
The first-generation Ford Festiva was made beginning in 1986 under Ford’s Mazda division in Japan. The same year, another company with Ford ties, Kia, started assembling what would be North America’s Ford Festiva. With much cheaper labor costs, they could make them for less than in either Japan or the US. The LX was the higher trim level car and this one may be about as luxurious as they got. It looks just about perfect inside and out and has never been driven in the winter, according to the seller.
This car is an LX so it has a 5-speed manual transmission rather than a 4-speed. The seats look perfect in the front and the rear seating area looks basically like new. There is absolutely no rust on this car other than the usual light surface rust on a few fasteners which is normal. The only problem with driving a car this small to get good MPG is, of course, they weren’t the best in safety ratings. This car only received 2 stars out of 5 in crash testing, so there’s that. There were no texting drivers in 1988 and now there are almost no drivers who are not texting while driving. I mean, other than all of you… right?
Sadly, they ran out of room on the eBay link so there isn’t an engine photo but it’s a Mazda 1.3L inline-four with just under 60 horsepower. It has had a lot of maintenance on it over the years and sounds like it’s ready to go. Would any of you daily drive a car this old and this small to get the benefit of good MPG?
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