The Ford Escort is a small family car that was manufactured by Ford of Europe from 1968 until 2004. In total, the six generations were spread across three basic platforms: the original, rear-wheel-drive Mk.1/Mk.2 (1968–1980), the "Erika" front-wheel-drive Mk.3/Mk.4 (1980–1992), and the final CE-14 Mk.5/Mk.6 (1990–2002) version. Its successor, the Ford Focus, was released in 1998, but the final generation of Escort was phased out gradually, with the panel van version ending production in 2002 in favour of the Ford Transit Connect.

The Escort was frequently the best-selling car in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s. More than 4.1 million Escorts of all generations were sold there over a period of 33 years.

In 2014, Ford revived the Escort name for a car based on the second-generation Ford Focus, sold on the Chinese market.

The first use of the "Ford Escort" name was for a reduced-specification version of the Ford Squire, a 1950s estate-car version of the British Ford Anglia 100E.

The Mark I Ford Escort was introduced in Ireland and the United Kingdom at the end of 1967, making its show debut at the Brussels Motor Show in January 1968. It replaced the successful, long-running Anglia. The Escort was also presented in Europe as the first passenger car to be developed by the merged Ford of Europe (the Transit van having been the first product of this collaboration). Escort production commenced at the Halewood plant in England during the closing months of 1967, and for left-hand-drive markets during September 1968 at the Ford plant in Genk.

Initially, the continental Escorts differed slightly under the skin from the UK-built ones. The front suspension and steering gear were configured differently and the brakes were fitted with dual hydraulic circuits; also, the wheels fitted on the Genk-built Escorts had wider rims. At the beginning of 1970, continental European production transferred to a new plant on the edge of Saarlouis, West Germany.

The Escort was a commercial success in several parts of Western Europe, but nowhere more so than in the UK, where the national bestseller of the 1960s, BMC's Austin/Morris 1100 was beginning to show its age, while Ford's own Cortina had grown, both in dimensions and in price, beyond the market niche at which it had originally been pitched. It competed with the Vauxhall Viva, and from early 1970, the Rootes Group's Hillman Avenger.

In June 1974, six years after the car's UK introduction, Ford announced the completion of the two-millionth Ford Escort, a milestone hitherto unmatched by any Ford model outside the US. Ford also stated that 60% of the two million Escorts had been built in Britain. In West Germany, cars were built at a slower rate of around 150,000 cars per year, slumping to 78,604 in 1974, which was the last year for the Escort Mk1. Many of the German built Escorts were exported, notably to Benelux and Italy; from the perspective of the West German domestic market, the car was cramped and uncomfortable when compared with the well-established and comparably priced Opel Kadett, and it was technically primitive when set against the successful imported Fiat 128 and Renault 12. Subsequent generations of the Escort closed the gap somewhat, but in Europe's largest auto market, Escort sales volumes always came in significantly behind those of the General Motors Kadett and its Astra successor.^{[citation needed]}