It's possible that I saw this car every day, back in that era. Zone I is the Mission District, where I lived around the time this car was new, and where I always left all the windows open and doors unlocked on my primered-out 1965 Impala sedan (to avoid having the windows smashed by thieves looking to steal 14¢ from the ashtray). It survived on the rough-on-cars streets of San Francisco for many years, based on this thick stack of residential parking permits. This one got tantalizingly close to the magical 200,000-mile mark, but fell a bit short. The 1992 Ford Escort, a very close relative of the Protegé, started at $9,795 ($21,051 today) for the sedan. The similarly-equipped 1992 Honda Civic LX sedan listed at $11,585 ($24,897 now), while the Toyota Corolla Deluxe sedan was $10,408 ($22,368). The MSRP on this car, which appears to be an upscale LX model, was $11,299 (about $24,283 in 2023 bucks). ![]() This car would have been lots of fun to drive with the base five-speed manual transmission (early-1990s Protegés generally eat up same-era Integras and Sentra SE-Rs on the race track, based on what I've seen at the 150+ 24 Hours of Lemons races I've worked, though much of that has to do with Mazda's superior reliability under race conditions), but this car has the fun-sapping slushbox installed. Horsepower was rated at 125 in this application. This one has a 1.8-liter B-series straight-four, larger-displacement cousin to the engine under the hood of the '92 Miata (which got this engine starting in 1994). The family tree for this car would show a lot of interesting branches leading to Ford models we could buy here, including the post-1990 North American Ford Escort, the Mercury Tracer and the Australian-built 1991-1994 Mercury Capri. Mazda continued selling the Protegé all the way through the demise of the Familia itself, in 2003 (when you could get a Zoom-Zoomified Mazdaspeed MP3 version). ![]() Here's one of those early Protegés, found last fall in a Northern California boneyard.Īs with the Cadillac Allanté, Plymouth Volaré and Oldsmobile Troféo, it's important to keep the accent when writing about the Protegé. ![]() For 1990, presumably while the automotive world was distracted by the brand-new MX-5 Miata, the North American Familia sedan became the Protegé, while the hatchback kept the 323 name until getting axed after 1994. The GLC went to front-wheel-drive for the 1981 model year, and then Mazda switched the name to 323 when the Familia got an update for 1986. Various names for the US-market Familia were used at first (including 1200, R100, 808 and RX-3), but eventually the company settled on GLC (which stood for Great Little Car and featured a catchy little tune in its TV commercials) in 1976 and stuck with it for quite a while. The Toyo Kogyo Company first began importing the Mazda Familia to the United States in 1971. Junkyard Gem: 1992 Mazda Protegé sedan Between the 323 and the Mazda3, there was the Protegé.
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