Escort set a fast sales tempo with at the very least 320,000 copies in every of its first two years. So, too, the extremely visible new-car sellers that arrange "velocity outlets" to improve on what their factories had been doing. The other was a extreme downturn in the national economic system -- abetted by another gasoline crisis -- that began in the spring of 'seventy nine and put a giant crimp in all new-car gross sales.