Car Disgust–Ford Aspire
All you really need to know about the Ford Aspire is that the Enterprise Rent-a-Car branch at which my wife worked years ago–an establishment not exactly filled with sleek and exotic machinery–held the Aspire in such ignominious regard that the staff broke the name into two sylables and added an extra “s” to the name. Yes, because the car drove like, well, butt. Even so, the car’s nickname was nowhere near as obscene as the car itself.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking up small, cheap, light hatchbacks, but one must draw the line somewhere. You know it’s bad when the Aspire was nowhere near as sleek or exotic as its fierce mid-1990s competitor, the Geo Metro. Try to wrap your mind around that for a moment.
Manufactured by Kia a decade before the company fixed its woeful quality problems, the Aspire did nothing to enhance Ford’s small-car reputation. The Aspire had an incredibly underpowered 1.3-liter 4-cylinder engine, which meant the Aspire had great difficulty reaching highway speeds and climbing steep hills.
Once Aspires hit the 100,000-mile mark, the engine has a tendency to sound as if it had gravel in the combustion chamber. I’m not sure if it’s a design defect or poor maintenance caused by the car’s disposable aura–probably both–but every Aspire that I’ve heard in the past few years has souded as if it’s running completely without lubrication.
Likewise, the build quality was such that the sheet metal could be dimpled and molded simply with one’s thumb and index finger. The Aspire was also replete with all of the electronic malfunctions and poor interior fit-and-finish typical of underengineered and overcomplex compact cars in the mid-1990s.
I once saw an Aspire for-sale listing that so inspired me that I archived the text for safe-keeping. The attempts to build excitement are rich in their irony:
“This is a beautiful 1994 Ford Aspire Hatchback that was adult owned and maintained. This is by no means your typical vehicle. Its senior owner maintained this beauty consistently in a super-meticulous manner … this vehicle has all of the attributes you could want in a vehicle … Inside and out, this is an overall real beauty. The engine is very powerful and idles super smoothly.”