As-New 1978 Ford Granada Is Today's Bring a Trailer Find

Yahoo

08-02-2025

Here's a museum-quality everyday Ford from the late 1970s.
It's essentially a time capsule, with only 47 miles on the odometer.
It's not fancy or fast, but it does have the rarely seen four-speed manual transmission.
In 1978, the fortunate few might have bought a new Porsche 928 or BMW 635CSi. The most enterprising purveyors of imported party stuffs might have picked up a newly bewinged Lamborghini Countach. Most Americans, though, had more mundane jobs and more mundane cars—their automotive excitement was maybe watching Starsky & Hutch drive through a fruit stand once a week. Over the years, while the Porsches and Bimmers got polished and pampered, the regular cars got used up and thrown away. But not all of them.
Today's blast from the past at Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos) is a 1978 Ford Granada two-door, and it only has 47 miles on the odometer. It was reportedly driven home from the dealer then stored by its original owner for decades, a highly unusual garage-queen life for a deeply ordinary machine. But by surviving in shockingly original condition, it has aged, unexpectedly, into something quite special.
Ford launched the Granada in 1975 as a slight step up from the Maverick compact sedan, a car for the someone who dreamed of an LTD but didn't relish the thought of putting gas in that two-foot-longer mastodon. With its humble Maverick underpinings, the Granada was not the choice for disco-listening groovy cats, but a sort of dadmobile for people who just wanted to listen to Perry Como while they drove to work at the Acme stapler factory.
If you wanted big-car luxury, you could get a laundry list of options on the Granada. Or you could not. This example is slightly unusual for having the four-on-the-floor manual transmission, but it doesn't have many extras besides an AM/FM stereo with an eight-track player. It's finished in black with red vinyl upholstery and sports 14-inch steel wheels with wheel covers. The engine is the 4.1-liter Thriftpower inline-six, which, with 88 horsepower on tap, is clearly far more thrift than power. The tires were replaced three years ago.
Ford's advertising made an attempt to burnish the Granada's image by challenging consumers to compare it to a similarly sized Mercedes. "Can you tell its looks from a $20,000 Mercedes-Benz?" Uh, yes. Obviously. Ford's plant was cranking these things out as fast as it could, and the late 1970s were not what you'd call a time of peak quality control. Still, the Granada offered some luxuries at less than a quarter the cost of the Merc.
With only 47 miles on the odometer, this Ford is a time capsule of regular everyday life toward the end of the 1970s. It'd be ideal for anyone filming a period movie or TV series, or perhaps as part of a museum display on the Carter administration.
Or you could roll right up to your local Cars & Coffee event and show up all the gathered vintage BMWs and Porsches with a car of a type no one has seen in decades. A perfect, low-mileage Granada with a four-speed manual transmission? Just throw a coupla Perry Como eight-tracks in the glovebox, and it'll be like you're right back in the late '70s.
The auction ends on February 11.
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