Junkyard Find: 1992 Ford Crown Victoria LX
Since we admired a 1993 Mercury Grand Marquis as last week's Junkyard Find, it makes sense to follow that up with its near-identical Ford sibling: an early-production 1992 Ford Crown Victoria.
Ford sold squared-off Panther-platform LTD Crown Victorias from the 1980 through 1991 model years, while the regular LTD became a Mustang sibling by moving to the Fox platform for 1983.
Still a Panther, the Taurus-influenced, rounded-off Crown Victoria stayed in production for the 1992 through 2012 model years (though the handful of '12s weren't sold in North America).
This is an early-production car for the new generation of Crown Victoria, rolling off Ontario's St. Thomas Assembly line in March of 1991.
While most of these cars seemed to end up in fleet use (mostly in law-enforcement service as the P71 Police Interceptor), this one is a luxurious civilian machine with the mid-grade LX trim level.
This appears to be the leather seat option in Cranberry, which cost an extra $555 ($1,192 in 2022 dollars).
The MSRP on the 1992 Ford Crown Victoria LX was $20,897, or about $44,912 today.
Naturally, you could get Ford's famous pushbutton keyless-entry system on the LX (though not on the base model nor on the fleet version), for a mere $137 ($294 now).
It's still not too tough to find examples of the P71 Police Interceptor in car graveyards these days, but the 1992-1997 civilian cars have become very rare.
Not even 175,000 miles showing on the odometer. I'll bet it was just driven to church on Sundays.
When you see a junkyard car with the ignition key dangling from a wire loop around the steering column, you know that car probably arrived as an insurance total or a dealership trade-in that failed to get serious bids at auction.
Formby Ford was in Fort Lupton, Colorado, about 50 miles to the northeast of this car's current parking spot.
As we discussed with last week's Grandma Keith, the Ford Modular 4.6 V8 engine proved to be quite reliable over the long term, though nobody knew that yet when this car was new.
With single exhaust, this engine made 190 horsepower and 260 pound-feet. With the optional dual exhaust, you got 210 horsepower and 270 pound-feet. I can say from personal experience with my slightly-more-powerful 1997 P71 Police Interceptor that these cars can get an honest 25 miles per gallon on the highway, despite weighing close to two tons.
As Crown Victoria production continued through the 1990s and 2000s, you'd see a dozen black-and-whites for every civilian example on the road. Ford pushed the cop version hard from the very beginning, with spectacular sales results. By the way, has anyone ever seen an early-1990s Taurus police car?
If you care about your family's safety, there's only one choice. Just don't get rear-ended in one!
More room, more agile. More than ever, it's the new Crown Victoria.
[Images by the author]
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Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Bosch Legacy is really good. Bosch is still Bosch.
I sold Fords in 2005 when I needed a break from turning wrenches. I tried to have a Crown Vic built for my parents but the dealer I worked for wouldn't place the order. So I called a fiend who was a senior materials engineer for Ford. The sales manager came up and asked me who I knew at Ford because they called and told them to let me order the car.
So I had a Crown Vic built for them and fully equipped with the tow package. This was basically the same car as the interceptor minus the DME/trans mapping.
My mother gave up her licence in 2010 and gave the car to me with 62k on it. I gave to the wife who put another 60k on it before giving it to our son. He put another 25k on before getting a newer car this spring. I then sold it to a kid for $500 back in May.
As for seeing a Taurus police car we sold the CIA 30 of them and I was one of the volunteers who drove them over to Langley. Yes they have their own police force.