1973 Ford Courier Gets Hilarious Regular Car Reviews Treatment
This 1973 Ford Courier is tiny, slow, and devoid of fancy features, but that’s precisely what’s so great about it.
While most have been comparing the 2022 Ford Maverick to the last-gen Ford Ranger over the last few weeks, lest we forget, Ford also made another compact pickup long before the Ranger came along – the Courier. The Courier wasn’t a ground-up Blue Oval creation, however. In fact, it was a rebadged and slightly restyled Mazda B-Series, but it also gave Ford a way to battle Toyota and Nissan/Datsun in a time when small, fuel-efficient pickups were all the rage. And that history lesson is taught in a rather humorous way via this Regular Car Reviews video featuring a pretty nice 1973 Ford Courier.
Right off the bat, our host points out that this small 1973 Ford Courier has one large problem – power, or lack thereof. “It’s a fine pickup for the Japanese or our Atlantic cousins,” he says. “But with only 74 horsepower and 92 pound-feet of torque, and all of that’s put through a skinny fat three-speed auto groaner, this little lugger is unsafe on U.S.A. highways. I hope you like using your four-ways on hills. You’re gonna.”
The Courier is precisely the opposite of the modern-day macho pickup in terms of styling, too. “It’s so innocent looking that truck tank characters don’t perceive it as a threat,” our host says. “So I got thumbs up and Chad nods everywhere I went.” On the bright side, its compact size also makes the Courier capable of parking inside of a gardening trailer, to there’s that.
It’s also pretty fun to just drive around at slower speeds, a requirement because this thing isn’t going anywhere fast. “There are more comfortable cars to cruise in,” RGR says. “But you don’t see many Couriers. It’s different because Couriers weren’t marketed as aspirational or even something that you want to keep. ‘Look, we know things suck right now, so here at Ford, we wanted to give you something that sucks.'”
Regardless, RGR can’t help but enjoy tooling around in the Courier, even though it was created to be an efficient tool that you used up and threw away. “There’s a purity to the Ford Courier,” he says. It’s not big, it’s not fast, it’s not heavy duty. It’s the antithesis of the modern American truck because it secretly doesn’t want to be a crossover. It’s not trying to be manly, whatever that means. It’s not the choice of anyone who likes having options. It’s so cheap you do whatever you want with it, and people did, because you don’t see Couriers anymore.”
At the end of the day, that’s what’s nice about the Courier – it isn’t so fancy and expensive that it can’t be utilitarian. RGR refers to this phenomenon as the “untouched majesty of the uncomplicated,” and we can’t possibly sum up this tiny pickup better than that.
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