While its name may have been Aerostar, Ford’s first “mini” van’s exit was anything but. Despite introducing the small and stylish Mercury Villager in 1993 and the truly Chrysler-competitive Ford Windstar in 1995, the Aerostar dragged on for a few more years, resisting total discontinuation until August 1997, some twelve years after it first went into production.
With its low-slung, space-shuttle inspired nose, slabbed sides, sliding rear windows, and tall height due to its rear-wheel drive layout, the Ford Aerostar was undeniably one of the most unusual and frankly, awkward looking minivans on the market. Taking this into account, it sold reasonably well and despite few visual updates over its lengthy life, Ford made meaningful upgrades over the course of its run, including more powerful engines, available all-wheel drive, interior enhancements for greater comfort and convenience, and an advanced-for-the-times 5-speed automatic transmission.
While it wasn’t commonly inflicted with its younger Windstar sibling’s failing head gaskets of its 3.8L Essex V6 and self-destructing transmissions, nonetheless, with sales dwindling in its final years, the Aerostar is a vehicle rarely seen today, at least in the northeast U.S. So, while finding a pristine as can be Aerostar is the pride of a curbivore, to the average person it’s just a lucky star of free aero dust in the wind.
Photographed in Hanover, Massachusetts – May 2018
Related Reading:
1990 Ford Aerostar (CC Capsule)
1994 Ford Aerostar (COAL)
1995 Ford Aerostar (How Hard Can It Be To Make A Minivan) Part II
Wow! I have not seen a running Aerostar in quite awhile. Is the silver Honda covering all the rusty parts? Or perhaps this A-Star lived a pampered life as the good-weather interstate cruiser for an elderly couple and has been hidden away when the salt has been out? Either way this is a rare sight anymore.
I just shot this one two days ago, one block from my house. Someone has cleaned it up very thoroughly. There’s still a few around here.
That one’s a ’97 b/c there’s no amber in the tail lights. You found a rare one indeed.
I still see Aerostars on the road here quite often (“here” being northern California). In fact it seems like I actually see more Aerostars on the road than the newer Windstar, not that I’ve done any sort of formal survey. Maybe the just Aerostar stands out more due to it’s height and more distinctive shape. Or maybe Windstars are less reliable than Aerostars, as discussed here not that long ago.
My Dad had one, bought used from a Ford dealer. Unlike the Chrysler minivans, it felt, rode and drove more like a small truck than a car, which of course it WAS. His had the 4- liter V-6 and automatic, was stronger, torquier-feeling than the Chryslers, and drove with no quirks. It had some oddities befall it: an odd, round rust spot the size of a quarter appeared on the hood, bubbling up under the paint (a color similar to the featured Aerostar) in a manner unlike what one would find in a California car, and indeed the only rust on the entire vehicle. The front brake calipers stuck, possibly due to being driven on San Francisco hills, and due to lack of maintenance (I never worked on this van), one of them wore entirely through a brake pad and then ground down a rotor to the ventlating fins. How he didn’t feel the brake grinding or hear a noise (though he was hard of hearing from an accident while a shipyard worker in WWII), I didn’t want to ask. Other than that, the van plodded on until traded on a 1996 Nissan Quest.
Funny, my ex-wife’s Tempo coupe had a quarter-sized rust spot at about the position of the rear passenger’s outboard elbow. The car was only about three years old. I Dremeled it clean and hit it with primer and touch-up paint. The rust never came back, even five years later.
I’m of the impression that these were a little worse than average with respect to rust.
Combined with their frumpy, utilitarian looks, I’m sure the rust did not make them long for this world in great quantities.
I once drove a 3.0L Vulcan-powered Aerostar and remarked that it was frighteneingly underpowered.
I drove an Aerostar quite a bit in the 1990s because my Uncle had one — and during summers I used to work in the store that he owned and would make deliveries in it.
Despite being in my 20s at the time and unaccustomed to driving trucks & vans, I never found the Aerostar ponderous or overly trucklike. In fact, I didn’t mind driving it at all. Maybe that’s because he had the Eddie Bauer edition, so the little tree designs on the seats compensated for any awkward driving characteristics.
That said, one thing I remember about that van is that it often had burned-out lights (tail lights, turn signals, interior lights). And then I started noticing that a whole lot of Aerostars had burned-out tail lights too. As far as I know, my uncle’s car never had any electrical problems more serious than that, but clearly something was amiss.
But still, on the rare occasion when I see Aerostars, I’m always taken back to summers delivering boxes for my uncle.
Perhaps there’s a QOTD to be written about model-specific reliability issues. Many Ford SUVs of a certain age have a cracked horizontal trip piece under the rear hatch glass, for instance, and older Suburbans seem to burn out one daytime running light on a regular basis. Strange how these little quirks pop up.
See also: Scion tC hatch handle, 1996-2007 Taurus/Sable sedan rear suspension sag from broken springs, water in the taillights of Ford Explorers, bad ground causing wrong part of taillight to light on 1997-2005 GM minivans and 1999-2006 GM trucks. Unusually bad rust on Mercedes Sprinters.
That cracked trim part was usually on the 02-05 Explorers and Mercury Mountaineer.
I call it a feature because i have never seen one without a cracked trim panel.
Some 02-05 Explorers owned by the State of Oregon or some other government agency do not have the replacement piece of plastic painted so I guess they wanted to save tax payer money.
The only light that ever burned out in my ’96 was in the middle of the speedometer. NONE of the tail light bulbs ever had to be replaced, at least during MY ownership. Now the headlights were a different story (the deer hits!).
Nice find, there’s one I see at work sometimes. Other than that one, I can’t recall seeing any others recently. I recall I used to see a few of the former postal cargo vans around.
IMO: The Aerostar seemed to be slightly less truck-like than the Chevy Astrovan, but not nearly as car-like as the Mopar mini-vans.
I guess it all depended on your priorities at the time…people mover (Mopar) or cargo mover (Ford & Chevy).
I read on the internet (so it MUST be true?) that the later models Mopar minivans had quite a few “conquest” sales from disgruntled Aerostar and Astrovan owners.
I’d bet conquests from disgruntled Ford Windstar and Chevy Lumina/Venture/Uplander drivers.
Besides head gaskets, Windstar had other weird quality bugs, like HVAC temp blend doors breaking, costing an arm and a leg to fix.
In my part of the world the Aerostar and Astro maintained a core set of buyers among those who liked to camp and tow boats or trailers. And of course there would have been the hard core Ford and Chevy/GMC loyalists. But most suburban families went with the Chryslers. I can’t say I recall anyone from either group defecting to the other. There were RWD Truck-ish minivan people and there were Chrysler minivan people.
Towing a boat or trailer with that sluggish V6 engine must have been a true test of patience?
My employer at the time (Uncle Sam) had several 3.0 V6/AOD transmission Aerostars in the parking lot. Base models, no insulation or nicer interiors.
I recall them as being noisy, rough riding and S L O W; even compared to the 4 cylinder Plymouth Breeze choices in the parking lot.
The 4 liter moved the Aerostar around just fine.
It SURE did. This photo was taken in November 2014 not long after I began making the Nissan 720 trailer road-worthy earlier that spring & summer. As of this past month, the whole project has taken a total of roughly 4 years, ALL off-and-on b/c of college & work. The way the trailer looks now makes those 4 years of labor worth it! And except for REALLY steep hills, the 4.0 moved it (& the Aerostar) like it was never there.
Aerostars are still plentiful on the road in my part of Washington State. Whenever I am on the Olympic Peninsula, I see them everywhere. My guess is the Port Angeles area is where Aerostars go for their retirement laps.
Every time I saw one, I always thought it looked like the shuttle. Paint it white over lower black trim, add the tail and stubby wings and you win every parade you enter! However, it appeared against the dustbuster vans, did it not? Given the choice of a reusable spacecraft or a handheld vacuum, which would you have bought?
Actually there was a big shuttle tie in when the Aerostar came out
Aerostar kind of looks like the 70’s Ford Carousel van concept that Henry Ford II rejected. Said “it will take sales away from LTD Country Squire!”. Has a similar B pillar and side window. See link below.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/1972-ford-carousel-minivan-concept-car.htm
Carousel was based on E-Series, while Aerostar was Ranger platform.
That is such myopic think on HFII’s part. Afraid to cannibalize Country Squire sales with minivans, he instead let Chrysler do it for him.
I always had a soft spot for Aerostars; I think it’s the sliding side windows that look like those on a coach bus, slanted pillars and all. But I also like how Ford didn’t cave in to the “minivans are stigmatized” scoffers and built stylish outdoorsy Eddie Bauer editions just like with Explorers.
I don’t blame HFII (or the rest of Ford management, for that matter) for this. Exactly nobody foresaw what a huge hit the minivan would become. Ford had invested quite a lot in the very nicest large passenger van on the market in the Club Wagon – which was shorter in overall length than the Country Squire up through 1978. If anything was going to pull share from a Country Squire it would have been one of those. And Ford kept investing in that segment as late as the early 90s, way after the Country Squire died.
Chrysler had no family wagon segment to protect because it had never been a really big player there. Chrysler was holding a bucket full of lemons and someone made a minivan out of them. It took years before anyone else cracked the code of what made a minivan popular, so I cannot fault Ford for its 1980s view that a smaller Club Wagon would be the best play.
I am quite certain that if Chrysler had possessed a viable smaller truck chassis that it would have tried to downsize the old Dodge Sportsman/Ram Wagon concept into something very much like the Astro or Aerostar. But they used the K car platform because that was all they had.
Aerostar really wasn’t on the Ranger platform, though they did share some components.
Those components include engines, transmissions, & wheels. Except for the steering wheel, stereo system, HVAC controls, & rear axle, nearly everything else is unique to the Aerostar, as I eventually found out.
I think SOME of the side mirrors were shared too but that would be it.
My sister had one of these for several years back in the early oughts. It was purchased used and was pretty much used up by the time she got rid of it. She was a single mother with three children during her ownership and I suspect that routine maintenance got deferred or just ignored completely. At one point my brother and I spent a weekend working on the A’star, trying to deal with some of the minor problems. We got it to the point where she was able to drive it for another 8-9 months before the head gasket failed. By then the car was worth less than the cost of repair so it was just scrapped. Fortunately for my sister she had remarried by then and had the means to purchase new wheels.
My company had a few Aerostars. They had issues, the 3.0L V-6’s would blow head gaskets (though not as frequently as the 3.8L), the catalytic converter was mounted so close to the transmission it would cook the gaskets and internal seals, TFI modules, and HVAC problems. We had one suffer from the infamous cruise control switch induced dash fire (totalled). You never see Aerostars anymore, but there are still loads of Chevy Astro’s in varying states of repair.
There are still a FEW Aerostars lingering around in my area (Saluda County & Lexington County, SC), but none of them are in any better overall condition than my ’96 ever was. Astros/Safaris ARE a bit more common, but even more so are other minivans that aren’t “DustBusters”, Previas, pre-’96 Caravans/Voyagers, or 1st-generation Windstars. Undoubtedly, the fact of whether or not a certain model is still in production has a SUBSTANTIAL influence.
I don’t see these very often, but when I do they seem to always be that awkward extended length bodystyle.
Oh, and it seems like a lot of the Aerostars with that stupid ground effects package are still out there, too.
My company must have had 2-3 dozen of these, so I guess they were significantly cheaper than the competition? Other vans would eventually supplant the Fords, but even the newer ones were RWD.
The biggest drawback to these vans, IMHO, was the tiny front footwell for both driver and passenger.
The minivan designers [Hal Sperlich] and Lee I. foresaw a garagable family van. Caravan/Voyager was a hit out of the gate.
Now, easy to bash minivans, but there was desire for more useable family haulers, then oversized wagons, with gun slit windows [Ford], and heavy clam shell tailgates [GM]. Or, the top heavy ‘love vans’.
The accountant I worked for had three of these (88,91,94) and always said they were much better built than the Windstars that followed.
My main recollection was driving his wife and kids on the freeway shortly after he got his 88, having to do a hi speed lane change after being cut off and putting the stupid thing up on three wheels! He usually gave his wife his vehicle and traded hers in but that scared her enough the she kept their 85 Dodge van til it was scrapped in the late nineties.
I did a 600 mile drive last weekend and saw at least two Aerostars.
We had a new Aerostar in 1996 and drove it all over the U.S, (self, wife, two teenage daughters). Loved the vehicle. It got totaled while parked in our driveway by a young kid racing a Mustang.
Have to take a shot of my next door neighbor’s driveway with three CC minivans. A Ford Windstar LX, a Plymouth Voyager and a Chevrolet Venture next to each other.
In addition to the picture, can we ask really nicely and get an owner’s comparison report on all 3? 🙂
Thanks for this, now i miss my 86 Aerostar:(
I don’t think that one’s an ’86; the front end would be ’92 at the oldest. Still a good looking cargo van with that porthole, though.
I owned it a few years ago when my craiglist drink and buy a car stupor had a grip on me. you are probably right i can’t remember the year but it sure was a nice van and i miss it.
“undeniably one of the most unusual and frankly, awkward looking minivans on the market”–but also among the most versatile by far, even today. If you want awkward, look at a “Dustbuster” or Previa.
“an advanced-for-the-times 5-speed automatic transmission”–but only on the ’97s with the 4.0L V6
And good luck finding those integrated child safety seats or the seat/bed conversion bench in the brochure picture if you ever want them.
IMHO, if Ford had kept up with parts support for these vans like with the Ranger, you might be surprised at how many would still be out there. There IS a guy who lives on the way I go to work who has a ’91 Aerostar Eddie Bauer almost identical to the one in the picture below (although it’s in an ’89 advertisement), along with a Lincoln Mark VII AND a Mark VIII! Other than the rear bumper being nearly all gone, the van looks VERY good for its age and so do the Marks. IF he ever plans on selling it, I want to be his first customer.