Oakland Street Sighting - 1967 Ford Cortina Mk II 1600 Deluxe Wagon

It's been a long time since we looked at an English Ford here. Heck, it's been a long time since I last saw an English Ford on the street. As the Covid pandemic drags out ever longer, I haven't been out and about photographing cars quite as much as I once did. Years ago I visited a house in Oakland with an Anglia 105E and a Cortina sedan. We've looked at the others, now here's a rare Cortina wagon.

Oakland Street Sighting - 1967 Ford Cortina Mk II

I like to network sometimes with other car spotters. Bill Stengel of The Street Peep clued me in to a collector of British Fords he once found in the Bay Area, but couldn't remember whether they were in Berkeley or Oakland. Well, they turned out to be in Oakland and I found them quite by coincidence. Someone has no fewer than four Cortinas and an Anglia 105E similar to the infamous flying car from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. This one is the four-door sedan, though you can also see a wagon (or estate) parked on the lawn in a few of the pictures. Oh, the joys of not having a homeowner's association!

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1967 Ford Cortina 1600 GT

Out of all the Ford products I've spotted in this state, this is easily one of the most obscure. It's a 1967 Ford Cortina (Mk II) 1600 GT. if you live in the US, you've probably never seen one, but Ford sold over 16,000 of them in the States in 1967. That was the year the Cortina became the best-selling car in its home market, the United Kingdom. That's right, the Cortina was a British Ford. It slotted below the compact Falcon in Ford's American lineup and was pretty much the only four-cylinder Ford available in America at the time. So why didn't it succeed here?