AutoTrader Find of the Week: 1989 Ford Thunderbird SC is Millennial Nostalgia Bait

Millennials get shortchanged on culture.

Boomers get to celebrate letterman jackets and free love hippie stuff. Gen X gets new wave, metal, and grunge music. And even though Gen Alpha has created an ironic caricature of Millennials by wearing baggy cargo jeans, designer basketball sneakers, and obnoxiously branded t-shirts, they don’t give us our due.

When it comes to cars, if you were born between the late 1980s and mid-‘90s, you probably don’t remember any chrome, heavy steel doors, sharp square lines, or thumping loud V8 engines. You probably remember plastic interiors, sticky pleather seats, digital readouts on gauges that looked like your alarm clock, and sweeping, rounded edges defining the automotive silhouettes of the day.

One look at this absolutely mint 1989 Ford Thunderbird SC offered for sale by White Rock Dodge in Surrey, B.C., on AutoTrader, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

It just looks and feels like your childhood. Take one glance at its plastic bumpers and ninja star-looking wheels and you can imagine playing your Game Boy in the back seat, or trying to get your Discman to work in the cassette deck with one of those ludicrous converters so you could play Big Shiny Tunes on repeat. Or maybe you can imagine sneaking off during your spare period to smoke cigarettes while scheming a way to buy beer for the big party on Saturday — of course, the second-hand Thunderbird in that mental image isn’t nearly as nice as this one.

This example, finished in its original Sandalwood Metallic paint colour (yes, this was an era where Ford had several different names for “beige”) with matching interior has only 25,494 km on the clock, practically looking like the day it rolled off the showroom floor.

The Thunderbird had a watershed year in 1987. After decades of malaise and the Thunderbird moving away from its sports car roots and steadily devolving into a luxury land yacht, Ford sought to take on the emerging German competition by morphing the Thunderbird into then-contemporary sports saloon.

Based on the revised “Fox” platform (basically all Fords from that era were), the ‘87 Thunderbird featured a turbocharged four-cylinder engine, anti-lock brakes, and electronically assisted suspension. It was pretty trick stuff for the day and introduced many buyers to “mode select” for suspension, allowing them to choose between comfort and sport settings. Sure, that’s standard equipment in 2024, but for 1987, it was a revelation in an American car.

The performance, tech, and overall presentation was so impressive that the Thunderbird Turbo Coupe was named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year for 1987.

However, this 1989 example is a bit of a different animal and is considered an entirely new generation model rather than just a facelift or mid-cycle update.

Gone was the turbo four-cylinder. In its place was Ford’s 3.8-litre V6, and in the top SC trim (which stood for “Super Coupe” and strangely not supercharged), the engine was supercharged, producing 12 psi and boosting horsepower to 210 ponies. The result was a two-second improvement in zero-to-60-mph times, dropping from eight to six seconds — which is acceptable performance figures even by today’s jaded standards.

These updates were so important that the Thunderbird SC won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year again in 1989.

Maybe that’s why one buyer rushed out to their local dealer in Leduc, Alta., to purchase this Thunderbird SC, which came standard with a five-speed manual transmission and Trac-lok rear differential. The original buyer held on to the car until 1997, when it was sold to another Alberta local, who, AutoTrader was told, only drove the car about 10 minutes every Sunday to church before it made its way to White Rock Dodge a few months ago.

The car continued to receive regular maintenance through Ford, with the second owner even tracking down new old stock of era-correct Michelin tires to keep everything as original as possible.

Interestingly, White Rock Dodge also tells AutoTrader that most interested parties in the vehicle have been Millennials, now in their mid-30s and feeling a keen sense of nostalgia for this era of design.

And I think that’s a good thing. Every other generation has gotten to preserve and celebrate the cultural markers of their youth. Their music is “classic.” Their clothes are “vintage.” And their cars were “always better back in their day.” 

But here’s the irony. Everything that Boomers and Gen X finds nostalgic is priced through the roof. Millennial stuff, on the other hand, still flies way under the radar (except for maybe Pokemon cards and anything in The Fast and The Furious).

But this little piece of Millennial automotive history is just $25,000, which means you actually enjoy a classic American car that isn’t from a time you’ve never actually known.