1988 Crown Victoria - a good car?

@jtsanders If it was a 1993, then it wasn’t a 6 cylinder. They only offered the 2.3L I4 and the 302 from 1987-1993.

Re driving old cars. As long as parts remain available, the primary downside from my experience is that you’re always smack-dab in the middle of the maintenance schedule. With older cars, there’s always some maintenance task due or soon to be due. With a new car you have a couple years at first where you’re on the leading edge of the maintenance schedule. Still, dollars and cents-wise, I expect you’re usually better off with an older car. True, you have more repair and maintenance to do, but you save even more dollars than that by not having a monthly car payment. Add to that considerably less insurance and registration fees. As long as you don’t mind the responsibility of keeping the routine maintenance up to schedule, owning an older car isn’t much of a burden.

XAML The Crown Victoria should be a great vehicle as long as you don’t do any hard braking or exceed 4000 RPM.

Unless it’s one of the very few carbureted mutants produced that year it should have a normal SEFI fuel injection system and it’s very easily serviced.

@FoDaddy‌, I took her word for it on both year and engine. It has a “5.0” on the side and I asked if it was the 302. She said no. A previous owner must have glued the numbers on.

Reliable and 198x do not belong in same sentence . Move on.

Unless you can get it for a song, I’d avoid it. While these were probably as good as anything else was in 1988, that’s like being the smartest guy in the remedial class. On the other hand though, these were very comfortable, rode nice, and handled pretty well for a car that size. And the trunks were cavernous.

While the FI in these may be easy to work on, the engine management systems were primitive compared to ones even a decade newer, and were not fun to troubleshoot. Many shops may not have a scan tool that will communicate with this system, and Ford’s “jumper this connection and count the needle sweeps on an analog voltmeter” method of retrieving codes was just asinine.

Add to that the likelihood of worn suspension components, dried out seals, rusted/frozen bolts, and whatever other gremlins have developed in a 27 year-old car, and the deal looks less attractive.

Surely you can find something a bit newer that’s still a bargain?