On paper, "out-of-the-box thinking" sounds great but there's a caveat; it's actually pointless if said "out-of-the-box thinking" is not actionable. The Ford Motor Company's "mid-sized" 1962 Ford Fairlane, the white car in the brochure still above, was actionable out-of-the-box thinking although we can quibble over their execution of it; that point all but mute seeing how many Fairlane's Ford sold before GM came with a gaggle of intermediates in 1964. Chrysler never really had one although if you want to split hairs, their 1962-1964 full size Dodge and Plymouth's models were technically "mid-size". Up until '62, domesitcally, only Amercian Motors offered anything so construed as a "mid-size" car so, the smaller on the outside and not all that much smaller on the inside Fairlane was pretty radical "new-think" for one of the Big Three. Speaking of boxes, wouldn't love to know what was in the box she's unwrapping?
Why Ford product planners felt compelled to come with a version of it for their Mercury division is a question us mere mortals will never get a concise answer to. They festooned "Meteor" to it, a model nameplate previously used in 1961 on a lower-priced alternative to the Mercury Monterey, and it sold so poorly through 1963 that not only did Mercury not have an intermediate for 1964, they abandoned the mid-size segment altogether until 1966.
Who knows why this car sold as poorly as it did; subjectively, it's certainly no homelier than the Fairlane that Ford sold over three-hundred thousand copies of in 1962 alone. Then again, perhaps it is. It's hard to say if it really as awful looking as I may think it is since, through my foggy goggles, I don't think the Edsel was as ugly as folks make it out to be. Toilet seat front end styling and all. The Edsel a victim of bad timing as much as anything else.
You could say the Mercury Meteor is a microcosm of everything that was wrong with Ford's middle child through most of it's tortured if mostly unremarkable eighty-two model years of existence. That being Ford never figured out what to do with it seeing that at any given stretch of time from 1938 through 2010, Mercury was either a dressed up Ford or dressed down Lincoln. In the early '60's, Mercury was clearly a fancified Ford. That in and of itself not a bad thing but Ford designers struggled mightily to disguise Mercury's as more, as dressed up Ford's, or less, as dressed down Lincolns. Meanwhile General Motors did, for the most part, such a good job of differentiating their myriad makes and models that to the unaware, one could think that there was no DNA shared between, for instance, a Chevrolet and a Buick. Especially back in the early 1960's.
Mercury slotted the mid-size Meteor in size and price point between their Comet, a longer wheel base version of the Ford Falcon, and the Ford Galaxie based (and lightly disguised) Monterey. What's more, the Meteor was based on the Comet's longer wheelbase, Falcon sourced chassis but with a slightly wider body. This slicing and dicing of chassis archetecture seeming very similar to what Chrysler did in the '80's and '90's with the "K-car". And all along you thought Lee Iacocca was an innovative, out-of-the-box thinker.
When General Motors came with their game-changing intermediates in 1964, what they called the "A-body", it was proprietary and shared nothing with GM's full-size and compact chassis'. While far more expensive to do than "simply" stretching a platform like a piece toffee, GM's mid-sizers never had the clumsy and ill-proportioned lines that plagued Ford's intermediates. Then again, it may be unfair to blame the engineers for what Ford designers were responsible for.
All is not lost, though. The size of this big-little car, as opposed to little-big car, is far more sensible and manageable than the dreadnaught Monterey and it does have some unique styling touches or doo-dads that are worth noting. The little meteor ornamentation on top of the front fenders complimented by the rear rocket taillights are decidedly cool. Problem is if you have to replace them, if you can find them anywhere, prices for them will be, warning, intentional pun incoming, out-of-this-world. The damn fender skirts, that the Fairlane never came with, should be removed and burned and whomever came up with the idea tarred and feathered.
Even the name of the car is worth mentioning above and beyond Ford's annoying habit of leaning on alliteration to name their Mercury models; some Ford models too. Much like Ford naming their top-of-the-line model "Galaxie", the Meteor was meant to capture the buying public's then fascination with all things space race.
However, this car was a Meteor wholly in the figurative sense. While meteor's enter the earth's atmosphere at speeds up to one-hundred sixty thousand miles per hour, that's why most burn up on entry, a Mercury Meteor with nothing more powerful than Ford's one-hundred sixty-four horsepower, 260 cubic-inch Windsor V-8 had trouble eclipsing (see what I did there?) zero-to-sixty in under twenty-seconds.
Many a Meteor still running today have head an engine swap some time over the last sixty-years or so but there's little that can be done for styling that makes the cars look like a person who's lost a considerable amount of weight but hasn't updated their wardrobe. Again, that styling detail something General Motor's was able to avoid with their tasty alberit very conventional intermediates in 1964; cars that may not have advanced the state-of-the-engineering art of the automobile at the time but certainly defined a market segment as something a whole lot more than the rote appliance like wares that we have today.
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