I Never Thought I Would Become a Ford Driver

For years Ford was simply not a marque that particularly interested me. Then I took a punt on a 2008 2.0 diesel Galaxy Ghia at trade price for £1,300 and, rather unexpectedly, I was converted. I love the thing to bits.

It wasn’t immaculate. There was a nasty dent which I spent another £300 having professionally repaired and sprayed, but underneath that it was fundamentally a very good, very useful car. And being a Ghia, it was at least the slightly better-appointed version rather than pure utilitarian family transport.

It is also in Tango, a relatively unusual colour for a Galaxy. Most seem to have been ordered in the usual rather worthy greys and blues, so mine at least has the decency to stand out in a car park.

And useful is really the point of the Galaxy.

I have yet to find anything sensible that defeats it. Fold the rear seats down and what was a seven-seat people carrier turns into something remarkably close to a van, except considerably nicer to drive. At a push I reckon I could get a double mattress into the back and use it as a rough camper. I haven’t yet, but the possibility is there.

There are kayak carriers on the roof, which serve two purposes. The first, unbelievably, is to carry a pair of kayaks. The second is rather more useful on a day-to-day basis: the upright ‘antennae’ are brilliant reference points for finding the car in a large and busy car park. Tango helps, but a pair of sticks poking into the air helps even more.

Friends have also discovered its usefulness. Over the years I have been recruited as an unofficial taxi service to Heathrow, particularly when a group of them has been heading off to Spain. People, suitcases and assorted holiday clutter simply disappear into it.

It is not a glamorous motor car. Nobody stops me at petrol stations to admire it. Nobody has ever asked whether I might consider selling it. But there is something deeply satisfying about a vehicle that just quietly accepts whatever ridiculous job you give it.

Mine eventually reached about 200,000 miles before deciding that enough was enough.

I was returning from Gloucester on the M5 when it suddenly lost power. No gradual deterioration, no polite warning that perhaps I ought to start thinking about mechanical matters. It simply stopped doing what an engine is supposed to do and I coasted onto the hard shoulder.

There was smoke.

When I pulled the dipstick out, the plastic end had melted.

This was not encouraging.

The most likely explanation was that the turbo had failed and, in the process, comprehensively cooked the engine. Whatever the precise sequence of events, it was fairly obvious that I was not going to be driving home.

By an extraordinary stroke of luck, a friend with a recovery truck was returning from a job in Birmingham, his truck was empty, and he was only about twenty miles behind me.

Sometimes the motoring gods take pity.

At that point there was the obvious question. Was a 200,000-mile Galaxy worth putting another engine into?

For me, the answer was fairly straightforward.

A replacement Galaxy of comparable usefulness, but with an entirely unknown history, would have cost me at least £4,500. I already knew this car. I knew what had been done to it, I knew its faults, and apart from the inconvenient matter of possessing a dead engine I knew it was fundamentally sound.

An 80,000-mile replacement engine cost £450 delivered.

I also spent £180 on a refurbished set of injectors, complete with test certificates. That last bit matters. ‘Refurbished injectors’ without evidence of what has actually been tested or calibrated can mean almost anything.

A friend then did the complete engine transplant for £500.

So for about £1,130 I had a Galaxy again, with an engine showing substantially fewer miles than the car around it. That was a great deal less than spending at least £4,500 on another elderly Galaxy and then discovering somebody else’s collection of problems.

And there was another reason I was particularly pleased to get it back. I had my car with a tow bar again.

That matters rather more than it might sound. I can pull my ordinary trailer, and now the motorcycle trailer I recently bought and am in the process of improving with footplates. The Galaxy is therefore not just transport in its own right. It also enables several of my other projects, which is probably as good a definition of usefulness as any.

Naturally, fitting another engine did not mean that the car immediately decided to behave itself.

It currently has an intermittent idle problem. The engine hunts, occasionally cuts out below about 1,500 rpm, sometimes produces an engine-malfunction warning and has developed a curious hiss as the revs fall. There is also a certain amount of rattling at low engine speeds.

The fuel filter has been changed. It made no difference.

The current fault code is P1335(1C), which is a useful reminder not to take diagnostic readers too literally. The generic translation points towards the crankshaft sensor, but the diagnostic trail rather more strongly points elsewhere. The problem appeared after an engine transplant, it occurs principally at idle, and on this engine the code can be associated with the EGR system. That makes disturbed or loose EGR wiring a much more plausible first place to look than blindly replacing a crankshaft sensor because the computer says so.

One thing my retirement job collecting cars for a second-hand car dealer has taught me is that, in my experience, most modern diagnostic problems are caused by the sensor, connector or wiring itself rather than by whatever catastrophe the sensor appears to be reporting. We collect enough cars with warning lights to make the pattern fairly obvious. You can still end up spending £300 replacing what is, at heart, a 50p sensor.

Daft.

In the meantime, I have perfected the brake-and-accelerator heel-and-toe technique of keeping the revs just above stalling point when coming to a halt. It is not exactly how Ford intended the car to be driven, but needs must.

That, I suppose, is part of keeping an older vehicle.

You gradually learn it. You notice what happens when it is cold, what changes under load, where a noise appears to be coming from and whether a warning light is actually telling you anything useful or has merely decided to join in.

The Galaxy will never have the visual appeal of my Mercedes 500SL, nor the character of the Triumph GT6 I am rebuilding. Nobody is likely to describe it as beautiful, although the Tango paint does at least save it from disappearing completely into the ranks of grey and blue family transport.

But I have become strangely attached to it.

Perhaps that is because it has never pretended to be anything other than what it is. It carries seven people when required, swallows absurd quantities of luggage, tows whatever I need towing and does jobs that would otherwise need a van.

And when its engine finally expired at 200,000 miles, it was still worth fixing.

I bought it as a cheap punt at trade price.

I never expected it to turn me into somebody who would say this about a Ford, but it did.

I love it to bits.

← Back to Articles