I've never been able to begin to understand why Ford glued "Cougar" to a Ford Granada station wagon for 1982. And only 1982. There had to be solid good reasoning behind that, right?
To me it was insult on top of injury seeing that for 1981 Mercury perched a four-door Cougar at the top of their mid-size sedan pecking order replacing the late and certainly not great Monarch. The Cougar two-door, essentially a badge engineered Thunderbird, stuck around. Such as it was, it least it was still technically true to at least what it was going back to 1974. While that was a far cry from even what it was from even 1971-1973 to say nothing of what it was from 1967-1969, it at least wasn't a station wagon. Yet.
Mercury's previous mid-size wagon was the Zephyr wagon which while they continued to make the Zephyr two and four door sedans in 1982, there was no wagon version. For 1982 the Ford division came out with a Granada wagon replacing the Fairmont wagon; maybe someone thought a Merc version was needed to help amortize costs? Ok. Fine. Again, though, as a Cougar?
Granted, "Cougar" didn't exactly hold the same cache that Thunderbird did but still, for a model nameplate that was at one time on par the Ford Mustang and then the Thunderbird, it seemed to me at least as a serious demotion for the model. Then again, the passionate cries of fans of something are rarely heard. Ford claims it listened to the Mustang faithful who clamored for Ford not to replace the Fox-body Mustang with what became the Probe but I've always thought that public relations nonsense. Then again, whom are we mortals to question the marketing and product planners at an automobile company.
The incessant model changing wasn't just at Mercury either. Ford tweaked and altered model names on so many of their vehicles in all of the divisions back then that you'd almost need an excel spread sheet to keep track of it all. It only got worse as the Cougar sedan and wagon became the Marquis in 1983 and what had been the Marquis became the Grand Marquis. Got that? And that was just at who gives a damn about Mercury too. Over at Ford, for '83, what had been the Granada got a face lift and became the LTD and the previous LTD became the LTD Crown Victoria before becoming just plain old, Crown Victoria. Not going to go there with Lincoln.
For 1983 Cougar returned to its rightful position in the division as a personal luxury car albeit one that once again was little more than lightly disguised Thunderbird.
If I've learned anything about working for large corporations is that there are scores and scores of people who have to justify their paychecks. Many of them are notorious for acting or looking as thought they're busy when in fact all they're doing is looking busy. They're really not doing much of anything. I 'd put money on all the deck chair rearranging Ford did back in the early '80's on it being a bunch of yahoo's just trying to justify their existence.
About the '82 Cougar wagon, in fairness, it was all together not a bad transportation conveyance. Built on the same platform that Ford build more than half its line up off of, that being the Fox-body, it handled well, despite its relative diminutive size was quite spacious inside and was actually reasonably bolted, screwed and glued together well. Sure, it fell down on itself on the details and don't get me started on it built with only Ford's wheezie 3.8 liter, carburetored V-6, but it got reasonably good gas mileage.
Just, please. Don't call it a Cougar.
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