Super Rare 1985 Ford Orion Ghia Comes out of Its Hiding Place, Will It Run?

Neil Rapsey is the one who opens the doors of a garage that looks ready to come crashing down and take the car it has been sheltering for the past 20 years with it.

His daughter owns the Ghia now. Her great-grandfather passed away about 20 years ago. The car has been sitting in the garage ever since. A relative of his bought it new. Then he wanted it, so he paid to take it home. It was in the mid-1990s, and the car was already 12 years old by then.

The Orion Ghia is definitely a low-mileage car. It just went on Sunday drives or to the local shop. That is how it gathered 57,391 miles (92,362 kilometers) on the clock in almost 40 years.

Neil's daughter is now 29 years old. When she was a newborn, Neil got a proposition to buy the car. He needed a four-door for his young family family. But he did not have the money to buy it.

It would have been just the right means of transportation for the Ford enthusiast that he ha always been. He owns an Escort now and owned a couple of Fiestas over the years. But those are not what we are here for today.

Johnny Smith from The Late Brake Show is afraid that if he sneezes, the garage will come down; that is how fragile it looks. Neil unbolts the doors of the vulnerable structure.

Once removed, they reveal the Orion Ghia trapped under a pile of useless items that the family deposited on it and around it. Bags of clothes, children's toys, and whatever the family did not need over the years, have built a castle of clutter and junk on the car.

The Ford Orion was the right car at the right time
The Orion came when Ford was looking for solutions to roll out a small family sedan to fight the Volkswagen Jetta and the Vauxhall Cavalier in the European market.

Ford launched the Orion on September 13, 1983. By November, it was among the 10 best-selling cars in Europe. It looked every inch the right model at the right time. Ford reportedly sold over 3.5 million Orions, but only about 100 Ghias are known to have survived. And this is one of them.

The Ghia was special in its own way. It came with a sunroof, sports front seats, headrests, power windows, central locking, a tachometer, and a display that informed the driver when the car needed maintenance. This equipment gave it upmarket pretensions when it didn't really belong there, considering the small sedan class it came from.

All Orion Ghias of the era were powered by the 1.6-liter CVH engine with both a carburetor and fuel injection options. It generated 103 horsepower (105 metric horsepower) and 102 pound-feet (138 Newton meters) of torque in a front-wheel drive setup. The 1.6 was mated to a five-speed manual box.

Once Neil and Johnny start removing items sitting on top of the car, the paintwork is finally visible. The Orion seems painted in Nimbus Gray, which doesn't really look bad, even after all these years it remained in the garage, away from the sunlight and the road. But the roof has been dripping on it, causing rust spots. However, rodents seemed to have stayed away from the locked-up Ford.

The car sits on four flat tires. But once they are aired up, they still hold the air like in their good old days. Johnny and Neil easily push the sedan out of the garage. It is finally out in broad daylight for the first time in 20 years!

Will that 1.6-liter engine fire up after 20 years?
Johnny pops the hood, and the engine compartment looks intact, except for the corroded surfaces, but all the wires and hoses are still in place. There is a plastic bag over the fuse box. Whoever locked it in the garage wanted that fuse box protected.

After checking the fluids to make sure they are at just the right level and putting in a new battery that Neil was keeping as a backup, Johnny plans to try to fire up the Orion Ghia. However, even with the new/old battery in, the car is still dead.

Once they finally get dashboard lights, they proceed with the plan. The final touch is a bit of fresh fuel. They have a spark, and the fuel pump works properly, but the engine still won't run. However, they manage to fire it up and, for the first time in over 20 years, the 1.6 is running on its own.

It misfires a little because most of the fuel is as old as the isolation of the Ford, but there is no smoke coming through the exhaust pipe.
The Ford Orion Ghia is washed for the first time in two decades

Now that the engine runs, the next step up is cleaning the car. Jonny sweeps the dirt off the roof, hood, and trunk lid, and there is plenty of it, before power-washing the vehicle. It is its very first wash in over two decades.

When he goes in to clean the seats, Johnny bumps into the Dancing Hamster. Some kid must have not gotten the toy at some point because a parent/grandparent forgot it in the Ford.

The aluminum stripes in the door cards still wear the protective plastic that covered them on the day this car drove through the factory gate.

Johnny is surprised to find pants and boxer shorts in the trunk, but you can’t judge the owner of a car by the things they keep in their trunk, right? He has found both men's and ladies' pants in cars before.

Neil hopes to buy it himself. It is his second chance to be the owner of this 1985 Ford Orion Ghia, and 30 years later, he doesn’t want to miss it this time.