Some things instantly become dated; in the automotive world, few things proclaim its time period better than a Pinto Cruising Wagon.
When the custom van craze hit in the mid-1970s, Ford realized that large, fuel hungry vans weren’t magic charms for all youthful, prospective buyers. Something a little more manageable in size and gas mileage, but of equal visual onslaught, was in order. Enter the Pinto Cruising Wagon.
Touted as a “mini street van”, the Pinto CW was introduced in late 1976, providing Ford a better idea for tapping into the youth market. It was a smart move, too, as the final result was definitely memorable with the only real investment being tape and plastic porthole windows. With all the performance tape graphics coming into vogue, Ford had gotten quite proficient in applying yards of multi-hued tape.
In an effort to fully exploit this lucrative market, Ford wisely offered several variations of the Cruising Wagon theme; our featured car is the most frequently seen in various brochures. The Cruising Wagon option would stick around until the end of the Pinto in 1980.
As a teen, Mrs. Jason had a friend whose older brother drove a Pinto Cruising Wagon. She said riding in the back seat was a claustrophobic experience since all you could see were steel walls or the back of the drivers head. These Pinto’s were nothing more than a sedan delivery with a different presentation; it’s amazing what a little paint and tape can yield.
Mrs. Jason and I have both seen this Pinto within a 10 mile radius of where we live. It appears its usage is frequent as evidenced by the two-way radio antennas and the plastic storage containers in the cargo area. With the trailer hitch on the back, it would be interesting to know what this Pinto has pulled in its life.
Is this Pinto a unicorn? While that is debatable, it is still doing its thing thirty-eight years later. While the Pinto was far from exciting, this Cruising Wagon does demonstrate a healthy dose of stamina.
Love it. Just seeing this on the road would bring a smile to my face.
I saw this Pinto again four days ago. The tailpipe was nearly dragging the ground, but it was still going strong.
I know right? I love Pintos, especially the cruising van. I felt privileged to see one just like this when I was a kid, in all of its sticker taped and portholed glory.
Excellent find! Those stripes make it all the more groovy and far out. I wonder how many people actually bought these to accommodate their active lifestyles as depicted by the brochure images?
‘Don’t come knocking while the Pinto is rocking’
Only if you really are wedded to missionary position – even with the additional roof space over my Vega GT hatchback, there wasn’t enough room to get any more adventurous.
I imagine this would be more appropriate. Steamy windows included.
Ha! When I went to college in the early ’80s in northern New York, there was one of these on campus with that exact bumper sticker. Given the size of the vehicle, and the weather in Potsdam, NY (not to mention the fact that it was a Pinto), even then I assumed the driver was what my now-college-age son would call a ‘tool’.
I wonder if these will ever become hipster-ironic cool? (Come to think of it, maybe that’s what the owner back then was thinking.)
Will ever? I have a feeling many a hipster would find the sense of irony here quite delightful.
Thanks to this CC’s Ford Pinto I learned that there was a thing called a Ford Escort Sundowner. Never heard of it before, let alone ever saw one. This is an Escort Mk2, built in the second half of the seventies, so from the same era as the Pinto.
You never heard of it before because it was built and sold in Australia.
I just knew it had to do something with that. I only know Escort vans with a much lower surfer dude-grade.
Curious they used a car with a real registration plate and sticker on it. You didn’t usually see that in ads in the seventies.
yep, these ones have name plates.
The term ‘Sundowner’ reminded me of something: Do any of you folks from Oz remember the long-gone Australian ‘SUNDOWNER’ video label? (I have 1 PAL-format VHS tape on this label. It’s an American movie filmed in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1974 called THE STREAK CAR COMPANY).
Yeah along with the Transit and Falcon Sundowner vans, done to compete with the Holden Sandman vans and utes
Wow Johannes. Where did you dig out this old gem?
Never saw any of these in the wild…
We did down here, but never common. The few guys with Escort vans preferred to do them up themselves. Probably worth more to the company as an image promotion (“We’re cool!”) rather than any financial benefit.
Time seems to forget what solid, well built cars Pinto’s really were. Kicked Vega’s butt. And I really get tired of them being bashed by people who are not even old enough to remember them. Happens all the time in my circle of friends and co-workers
I think that most folks who badmouth the pinto have forgotten the state of the automobile during the seventies. I thought of them like the Japanese cars. Smooth shifting high revving little things that always started and worked well.
Compared to todays car – not so much. Compared to a 70s vega etc I like them a lot.
Lee – I agree with you on the sentiments of the 1970’s automobile situation.
It was quite easy for the Japanese who built cramped rear wheel drive torture chambers to sell lots of their fuel thrifty hardware here – when that is about all you build, you seize the day and sell what you have when the selling was good.
Had Americans really demanded that type of product, Detroit would have delivered it. The fact that Detroit did not sell what some pompous, self-righteous historical revisionists wanted to see does not mean that Detroit did not offer a compelling product. As I recall having lived in the 1970’s, Pintos and Vegas were handily outselling every penalty box that Japan could sell model to model.
The real issue in the 1970’s was not that Detroit did not have the right product at the right time, but the quality across the domestic industry was going south – but that was not just the AUTOMOTIVE industry. American industry as a whole decided to take a vacation in the 1970’s and then the greedy UAW was extorting outrageous pay and benefits which forced further corners to be cut to keep prices competitive.
And let us not forget that the Vega was not done in just by manufacturer engineering issues, the UAW threw tantrums at Lordstown and workers were intentionally sabotaging product; so we have those whining for fewer hours, more pay, and more benefit intentionally jeopardizing product as a result.
I think we now know that both labor and industry were to blame for shoddy work and the Japanese which built comparatively better made products (at that time) captured people who were fed up with coke cans being placed in doors or parts being left off altogether.
Just as we can quibble about whether the Vega and Pinto et al could have been made better products, you could demand the same from some really awful Datsun and Toyoduh products in the 1970’s that were deadly in crashes – being well screwed together did have a price and you would get killed in the 1970’s and early 1980’s Japanese products at a higher rate than by the domestics.
I’m going to take exception to your glowing comment about Pintos. I test drove one for a few days a year before I bought my new car (a 74 Vega GT) and with an automatic tranny it was gutless.
Plus, there was no real sporty model at the time and not much else on the market that really appealed to me other than the Toyota Corona. I wanted a hatchback, something that handled and performed well (such as performance was back then) and sipped gas.
My wife as a single gal back then briefly owned a Pinto (can’t remember the year) and would agree with me they weren’t so great.
If you wanted a sporty Pinto back then, you bought a 2 liter/4-speed, then had someone who knew what they were doing revamp the suspension: springs, shocks, sway bars. And you became the low buck terror in B-sedan autocross, almost able to hold the course with a BMW 1600 or 2002.
I can speak from experience here. My younger brother’s first car was a brand new 1972 Pinto with the 2.0L/4 speed. Being the budding mechanic he eventually altered the engines compression to 11:1. I had my built 302-4V Cougar engine and with his engine and weight it was a very close race. Much more scary in the car, at 80 mph, due to that thinner construction.
On the other hand my mother had a brand new 1974 Pinto wagon with the 2.0L and automatic. It was a very, very slow dog to the point that I thought there were engine issues. The dealer wouldn’t do anything so I sent a letter to regional. In it I explained that from a standing start, at a stop light, I could beat the car across the intersection in my tennis shoes. I would do so for the benefit of the local newspaper if nothing is done. Needless to say something was done and it ended up being an ordinary dog before being dumped for an Audi 100LS which is another story.
I drove one of these as a family hand-me-down in the late 80s, though without the disco-groovy tape stripes.
It was pretty awful, better than riding the bus but that was about it. The engine was chugging, droning gutlessness, the handling boat-like and the back seat unusable. Side visibility was horrible, you dared not change lanes without speeding up to avoid whatever vehicle might be hiding in the truck-sized blind spot. It had a decent cargo capacity but the idea of getting amorous back there should be reserved for midgets.
Reliability was awful, it was pretty much done at 60k miles with a variety of engine and electrical problems.
The fishbowl window was cool, though.
I think that most folks who badmouth the pinto have forgotten the state of the automobile during the seventies. I thought of them like the Japanese cars. Smooth shifting high revving little things that always started and worked well.
My benchmark was Japanese cars of similar late-70s vintage, and the Pinto was egregiously awful by those standards. It was like from a different, more-mediocre planet compared to a Civic or 323; my friend’s Accord blew it out of the water. It put me off American cars for a long time.
My extended family owned a number of Pintos back in the day, I ended up with a 1979 Pinto ESS with all the optional doodads that FoMoCo could foist upon that little car. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great, either.
There’s a delineation in the timeline of the Pinto; before and after 1974. The pre-1974 Pintos I’d driven were pretty sprightly, fun to drive cars in the same way an afternoon at the local go-kart track is entertaining. But the transition to the 2.3 “Lima” motor, then emissions controls and 5 MPH bumpers made these cars old-feeling and arthritic, almost overnight. There were a few people I knew who had early Pintos that when they drove my 79 Pinto asked me what happened to it?
My (then 5 year old) Pinto had all of the normal Ford maladies of the times, many various seals leaked, the emissions controls were barely functional and the car got as good gas mileage as a pickup truck does today. I log my fuel mileage with every car, I can remember getting 27 MPG routinely on highway trips. To contrast, my wife’s 1977 Delta 88 (with 403 V8) would routinely get 23 MPG on highway trips. The 2.3 and 4 speed combination was supposed to get something like 33 MPG on the freeway…
Kind of like the “not invented here” attitude that GM had at the same time, the Pinto was not a particularly bad idea when started out, but it didn’t adapt well to all of the changes thrown at it. FWIW, even though it had very simple engineering and materials, it held up better than it’s crosstown rival and other foreign makes, too.
But I can’t help wonder what would have happened if Ford had just gone with an Americanized Escort in 1971 instead of the Pinto…
GZ, I must say that the Escort Mk1 looks rather tiny next to a Pinto. It might have been too small for the US. Certainly in 1971.
Johannes: I don’t know about these being too small for the US. Admittedly, I was a young boy when these cars were new. I grew up in the middle of the country where we were the last to adopt Japanese cars, but were fond of almost anything from Europe or Great Britain. I can remember hordes of Beetles, Fiats, and British roadsters rolling around my small Ohio town. There was even a period of time where Chrysler was selling a Hillman Avenger as the Plymouth Cricket in the US, easily the same size as a Mk1 Escort.
Of course, exchange rates being what they were, I could see why a German or British assembled Escort would not be competitive with other USDM homegrown cars. But really there was no technical reason why Ford (and GM with the many Opel products) couldn’t have sold these cars here instead of the Pinto.
You echo my secondhand experience with Pintos. The early ones were tossable little cars that were sprightly and fun to drive. But when the big bumpers came in, the fun went out and they became slugs. I knew at least 3 people with 71-73 models who were enthusiastic about them as drivers. But they never went back for newer ones.
I saw one of these a couple of years ago that was sitting on a trailer in someone’s driveway. It was a house out in the country in northwest Ohio, and I couldn’t tell if it was coming into or leaving the houselhold at the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to stop which was too bad because it was the first of these I had seen in 20 years.
I will confess that I like these a lot better now (as a funky period piece) than I did then. I was not a great fan of the 70s during the 70s, and when this came out, it exemplified everything I found wrong with the decade. But I have relaxed and mellowed since then and see this as a good effort by Ford to cash in on the custom van craze that was in full swing then. Pure style, almost zero utility – a perfect fit for the Disco era.
I can only imagine how miserable a back-seat ride would be in one of these, and I am not even claustrophobic.
I bought a new Pinto in September of 1976. Mine was a hatchback, but I might have bought a Cruising Wagon (having owned a Vega Panel Express) if the 77 Pinto wasn’t so ugly. By 79 the Pinto’s styling got “cleaned up” a bit, but by then I had moved on to Euro Fords with a Fiesta.
Nice. Van and wagon, I want both.
Great find! It’s rare enough to see a Pinto anywhere, let alone one of these! It’s an unbelievable period piece, though kudos to Ford for jumping into a youth movement that didn’t rely on engine performance. I remember picking up the brochure that contained pictures of this thing when I was on my annual new car pilgrimage with my Pop. I must admit I thought they looked ridiculous and couldn’t imagine anyone wanting one. That said, I hadn’t reached puberty when these came out, so the larger image message was lost on me at the time…
An interesting footnote for station wagon week,but ultimately, an also-ran.
That angle on the black paint on the side panel reminds me of a Gremlin’s side window. The unicorn sticker is the same exact one my hippie mom put on our sliding glass door. Hadn’t seen that in a while! Black light unicorns were very popular in that era…..
CC Effect ! last night I passed an early Pinto Coupe in VGC being transported on a trailer ~ decent brown paint , no dents/rust .
I too wasn’t impressed with Pintos when they were new but they were sturdy little cars that easily went 200,000 miles with minimal care and remained wildly popular as used cars until they were all used up and gone .
-Nate
I wouldn’t hate an ’80 Pinto Rallye in some crazy color like Butterscotch. Ford colors in the late ’70s and early ’80s were pretty cool.
There’s a ’76 Pinto wagon running around where I live, slowly returning to the earth because the owner drives it all winter in the salt…too bad!
There is an identical Cruising Wagon down the street from my house. It’s in pretty rough shape, is 1979-80 based on the square headlights and seems to be awaiting restoration…it’s been a long wait but hopefully one day it’s back up and running about!
Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive!
Great catch. I’ve long hoped to find one, but I’m glad someone here finally did.
I have to admit a genuine fondness for these relics. I was a freshman in high school when these hit the streets and our families driveway at that time included a 1970 Ford Ranch Wagon, a 1973 Pinto wagon, and a 1977 Pinto wagon. All were solid, reliable cars, but in that era of disco’s and custom vans (I remember that craze quite well), I have to admit I badly wanted one of these garish rides. Looking at the brochure, I much preferred the more tame striping shown on the yellow cruising wagon, though my young high school self still wanted it in the high visibility orange.
By the time 1982 rolled around and I bought my first car, the family trend continued when I bought a red 1976 Mercury Bobcat Villager wagon, complete with the woodgrain trim, bright red alpine plaid cloth interior, and the styled steel wheels. Interiors definitely did not come in drab colors back in the 1970’s!!
Despite the huge volumes sold, sighting any Pinto/Bobcat in the wild today is very rare, let alone a true unicorn like a cruising wagon. It is nice to know that at least one still survives!!
I love these Pinto wagons, and if I were to see one today it would definitely put a smile on my face, that’s for sure!
I imagine a sequel to Christine where a high school kid in the late 1990s picks up a junker that slowly repairs itself while playing nothing but disco on the AM dial. One of these would be perfect.
I like these. Taking a boring econobox and giving it a unique twist thats in line with the times has its appeal. And while ‘real’ performance will always reign supreme, Ive always had an unhealthy love of cheeseball malaise era stripe horsepower. Real cars that remind me of my hotwheels, stompers and slot cars i had as a kid will always tug the heart strings.
Truly a unique find–I don’t think I ever remember seeing one of these in person. Now that I think about it, the only Pinto I’ve seen in the last 4 or 5 years wasn’t a Pinto at all, it was the corporate twin Mercury Bobcat.
Love it. As Disco as it gets.
..
While the most commonly seen Pinto Cruising Wagon is the one with the tri-color striping, it was not the standard version (as can be seen in the brochure). Although the standard still had the blanked-out sides and porthole windows, the graphics were substantially more subdued. If you think the tri-color Pinto CW is rare, imagine how rare it would be to find one that didn’t have the extra-cost, tri-color graphics. Hell, the brochure even says you could get one with absolutely no graphics, at all. That’s quite interesting in that, other than the porthole windows, it would have been a direct competitor to the Vega Kammback wagon which had no rear side windows.
Just thought I’d enter the original mini-van contest by suggesting that it might have been the Mini Van, sold from 1960-1982.
This is one of those old cars I’ve only ever seen in old brochures, and assumed few ever actually existed and would probably never ever see one in person. This both proves my prevailing wisdom wrong, and makes me oddly optimistic.
Ford really had an odd fascination with their high performance stickers in this period by adding large black sections around and behind the windows, effectively creating fake daylight openings to create distinctive greenhouse shapes without actually spending any money to do so, the 78 Cobra II had a very similar (albiet more subtle) treatment below it’s side windows. Whether these seeded the minivan I’m not so sure, but the fake daylight openings this had are more prominent in cars than ever, it’s practically a given now so see black plastic extension sections at the corners of the windows to create the greenhouse shape of your favorite new sedan. Ford deserves full credit for pioneering that….
At 17 the pinto c.w. in the silver color was my first new car. I bought it new. Special order with a panosonic am/fm 8 track in dash. The optional v6 with automatic transmission t shift in center console. A girl friend made me a pillow that went from wall to wall with back seat down. I want one! Where can i find one?