This 38,000-mile 1971 Mercury Grand Marquis popped up in my Facebook Marketplace feed this morning, with the seller whimsically claiming you'd be the "envy at the car shows." As if anyone buys an old car just to impress people at car shows. For $22,500, I'd better be getting a lot more than envy.
This big old land yacht, oozing GM-inspired styling, rode on Ford Motor Company's all-new full-size platform introduced for 1969. Mercury's Marquis was positioned above the Monterey, while Ford's LTD offered much the same size and luxury for less money. Lincoln adopted a stretched version of this basic platform for the 1970 Continental, with a longer wheelbase and, depending on your tastes, a more prestigious badge.
For 1971, the standard Grand Marquis engine was a 429-cubic-inch V8. In most applications it was rated at 320 gross horsepower with a two-barrel carburetor and still benefited from relatively high compression, making premium fuel a good idea. That would all change quickly. Beginning in 1972, the industry switched from gross to net horsepower ratings, compression ratios fell to accommodate unleaded gasoline, and emissions regulations steadily robbed engines like this of much of their muscle. The 1973 oil embargo only accelerated the decline of big, thirsty luxury cars.
Contemporary road tests found these big Mercurys to be surprisingly quick. A 1969 Mercury Marquis—before "Grand Marquis" became a separate series for 1970—could reach 60 mph in about 8.2 seconds, impressive for a car tipping the scales at nearly 5,000 pounds.
The best part of this car, though, is this gloriously groovy interior. It's peak early-'70s American luxury, the kind of cabin that makes you want to pop in a Burt Bacharach 8-track, point the hood toward the interstate, and forget what gas costs.
"My Kinda Party" was the title song of Jason Aldean's fourth studio album that was released late in 2010. The single peaked at number-two on the Billboard Hot Country songs chart and was certified "Platinum", denoting sales of at least two-million. "My Kinda Party" was written and originally recorded by Brantley Gilbert in 2009. Warning, incoming old fashioned name drop incoming, the first time I met Brantley, I asked him what kind of car he was referring to in the lyric from the song, "got the cover off the sixty-eight". He didn't miss a beat saying, "'my '68 Cougar".
I knew I liked this kid. Here is a very young B.G. with his literal and figurative '68 he said he sold once for $4,000 to pay for his band to get back home to Georgia after a show in Texas. The guy he sold it to said he'd sell it back to him for what he paid for it but when Brantley went to do so, the guy went back on his word demanding $25,000. Long story short, after some negotiation and cajoling, Brantley got his '68 back.
The Ford Motor Company's late and most often time not-so-great middle priced division produced a "Cougar" in various guises on-and-off over 34-model years. In my opinion, the only model years that mattered are 1967, the first year it came out, and 1968 like B.G.'s and this $15,000 Facebook Marketplace find; save for side markers on the front fenders on '68 Cougars in compliance with federal regulations, the cars are the same. Subsequently, those were boom years for the nameplate and for the market segment Ford all but, excuse me, sired in 1964, when they, ahem, foaled the Mustang.
Ford sold nearly 681,000 Mustangs between its April 17, 1964 launch and the end of 1965 and by the end of the 1966 model year, Ford totaled near 1.3-million Mustangs sold making it the most successful new vehicle launch in automobile history. Not surprisingly, Mercury executives wanted a "Mustang" as well. A Mercury version was actually in the works alongside the original Mustang but Ford hedged their bets plowing all their marketing resources into one car and not two. Seeing the success of the Mustang, you could construe they focused and spent their money wisely. However, what was internally known as the "T-7", was to be a softer riding, luxury themed or tinged version of the Mustang. When Ford updated the Mustang for model year 1967, they allowed Mercury to introduce the "T-7"
Despite unique and quite handsome sheet metal stretched out on top of a three-inch longer wheelbase than the Mustang had, there were challenges with these cars right from the get go. Most of them circumstantial having nothing to do with the cars themselves.
First, with a softer suspension tuning and lacking some key luxury accoutrements like power windows, with the Cougar's on average $300 higher price tag, customers who bought into the pretense of an "American Jaguar" were hard to come by. And despite finding some 150,000 buyers in 1967 and around 113,000 for 1968, Ford surmised those sales came at the expense of not only the Mustang, but sales of Mercury Comet's, Mercury's at the time intermediate offering. Not only did Mercury's market share not increase, the Ford Motor Company's as a whole didn't either.
At least it had its to-die-for good looks. Along with funky, pointless cool doo-dads like concealed head lights and rear turn signals that blinked like the sequential tail lamps on Ford's hallowed Thunderbird did. Mercury even marketed these cars as being for the, get this, "man on his way to a Thunderbird". Ford had been experimenting with the this slotted, electric razor type front end for years before finally dropping it on the Cougar.
Circumstantially, in 1967, General Motors came out with two ponies to compete with Ford's duo splitting the pony car blade of grass further. Sales were remarkably strong for the segment through the end of '60's, Chrysler's pony was the Plymouth Barracuda (Dodge didn't get one until 1970), but by the end of decade, it seemed those who wanted one got theirs and didn't repeat buy or were put off by insurance surcharges that tacked on a steep tariff to anything remotely construed as a performance car.
Mercury built the Cougar on the same chassis as the Ford Mustang through 1973 doing a debatably ample job of disguising its Mustang's underpinnings. For 1974, Mercury lightly disguised a Ford Torino Elite as a "Cougar" thrusting the moniker into the burgeoning "personal luxury car" niche where it stayed stuck through 1997. A snappy performing but odd-looking coupe based on the Ford Contour debuted for MY 1998 through 2003. Them, sorry, Brantley and Janson, but the party was over. On an upside, Mercury sold more "Cougars" in their various guises than any other of their nameplates over its protracted 71-year existence.
A sable is a small, weasel-like, omnivorous mammal indigenous to forests in the Northern hemisphere. Sadly, they're probably best known for their luscious fur coats more than anything else.
The Ford Motor Company's late and more often than not "meh" middle division made a "Sable" from 1986 through 2003 and in 2008 and 2009. Based on whatever the then current version of Ford's Taurus was, oddly enough, when Ford changed the name of the Taurus to "Five Hundred" from 2004-2007, Mercury followed suit changing the name of their Sable to "Montego".
But wait, there's more. When Ford changed the name of what what was the "Five Hundred" to "Taurus" for 2008 and 2009, the "Montego" became "Sable". Our sea foam, Facebook Marketplace find here is a 1994 Montego. Sorry, Sable.
Seeing how below projections the Sable sold during it's protracted production run, it's somewhat amazing in retrospect Mercury built five different generations of it. Our '94 here part of the second-gen of Sables made between 1992 and 1995 and you wouldn't be alone not seeing the subtle changes in body work between the first two generations. You also wouldn't be alone in calling this a "Taurus". Which it for all intents and purposes it is.
The Mercury Sable underscores the challenges the Ford Motor Company had in defining what a Mercury was. Created in 1938 to compete with General Motors' middle-priced Oldsmobile and Buick brands, on the rarest of occasions, for most of its 74-model years a "Mercury" was no more than a fancified Ford sold alongside Lincolns.
At first a stand-alone division, Ford partnered Mercury with their Lincoln brand after World War II thus creating the Lincoln-Mercury division. If you're of a certain, shall we say, "vintage", the Lincoln-Mercury moniker actually meant something. Or, was supposed to mean something. Again, what that was always fairly murky.
If anything, a "Mercury" portended to be somewhat of an aspirational premium brand being sold fender-to-fender with Ford's luxury brand. Similar to what Chrysler did with their "low-priced" Plymouth and upmarket Chrysler divisions in creating "Chrysler-Plymouth", the tangible difference was, on paper at least, on the rarest of occasion would a customer enter a Chrysler showroom looking to buy a New Yorker and left with a Plymouth Fury. However, it was not uncommon for someone to walk into a Lincoln store fixing to buy a Continental and drive off in a much less expensive equivalent Mercury.
"Lincoln-Mercury" even rolled out a Taurus or Sable based Continental from 1988 through 1994. Although it had a longer-wheelbase and a more formal rear roofline, to those that knew, it was obvious those Continentals were Sables or Taurus' with little more than higher sticker prices.
On the upside, The Ford Motor Company broke their own sedan mold with these cars debuting them in 1985 for model-year 1986. Front-wheel-drive on such a large vehicle as well as four-wheel-independent suspension, rack-and-pinion steering, an available four-speed-overdrive automatic transmission along with an aerodynamic unit-body was truly progressive in its day.
GM girl I am, I much preferred the large-ish GM front-wheel-drivers introduced all but at the same time as the Sable and Taurus rolled out. Those even came in coupe guise whereas the Sable (and Taurus) didn't although the Sable and Taurus were available as wagons; the GM makes and models were not. Meanwhile, auto pundits showered these Fords with glowing reviews while damning the new-fangled Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac's with faint praise.
If anything, our green (or is it blue?) Sable with just 136,000-miles on its 29-year-old analog ticker has a fairly reasonable asking price of $2,995. Get it for closer to $2,500 and you have yourself an even better deal. It's a private sale and no doubt would have another two-grand or so tacked on if it was sold at a corner used car lot; we all know those places are more financing shops than used car purveyors. Also, keep in mind that 12- to 18-months ago, this $2,995 Mercury Sable would have had an asking price double that.
Looks like The Pandemic may finally, really be over.
Much like Dodge's "Dart", when I think of a "Mercury Comet", I first think of a small-car. Not surprising since I grew up in the 70's and a Mercury Comet when I was a kid was a compact car. And my first car was one of those "little" Comet's too.
That wasn't the case in the 1960's as the Mercury Comet, while based on Ford's new-for-1960 compact Falcon, was a pretty big car; not full-size by the standards of the day but at one-hundred ninety-five inches long stem-to-stern, it was hardly what you could consider tiny. I literally ran into this red-on-red '64 the other night in the upholstery shop where I had work done to the driver's seat on my "new-to-me", 2004 Mitsubishi Eclipset GTS Spyder. It's either the smallest big car ever made or vice-versa.
I'm not a Ford girl and perhaps it was the red-paint, the lighting, my excitement about getting my seat back, the cozy environ or the bossa nova, but I was all but slobbering over this thing like a five-year old on Chrustmas morning.
The first "Comet" was actually slated to be a 1960 Edsel known as the Model B and was based on a one-hundred fourteen inch long version of the Ford Falcon's one-hundred nine inch base. The Edsel Model B was also more than thirteen inches longer than a Falcon. However, when Edsel went belly-up after model-year 1959, the car was rebranded as simply "Comet", similar to "Valiant by Chrysler", and was sold through Mercury dealerships. It was christened officially as a "Mercury Comet" stating in 1963.
Ford, err, Mercury, redesigned Comet for 1964 using the same chassis the previous model used. Less than an inch longer than the "original" Comet, it's lack of tail-fins and straighter flanks gave the illusion that it was larger than it actually was. Which, somewhat ironically given that Comet was, for all intents and purposes a "smaller car", meant something back in the day when the size of a car supposedly mattered to American's. Was the Comet a big small car or a small big car? Personally, I think it's sized perfectly and a lot of buyers back then felt the same way; Comet sold pretty well. For a Mercury anyways.
Our lovely red-head being a Comet "Cyclone" meant it was born with a "high-performance" 289 cubic-inch V-8 similar to the "Hi-Po" 289 cubic-inch V-8 of Mustang fame. In 1966, Mercury moved the Comet to the same intermediate chassis Ford used to under-pin their Fairlane.
Comet became the awful Ford Maverick based turd of my childhood starting in 1971. Even back then I felt as though "my Comet" was a come-lately to a party that was quite the rager. Based on this '64, turns out I was right.
About the only thing I learned about this car was that it was originally white, it was "frankenstiened" up the ying-yang and was in the shop getting a new headliner and rear seats to match the previously restored front buckets.
The rest of my conversation with the shop owner was about keeping old leather in good shape. By the way, he recommended I use saddle soap and the same leather conditioner you'd use on a high quality leather jacket or sofa; never use Armour All or any leather cleaner you'd find in an Autozone or what not. Let the saddle soap dry completely before sitting on it too.
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.
Alan Jackson croons in his 1993 country-hit, "Mercury Blues" that he's "crazy 'bout a Mercury". The song makes reference to a "Mercury Forty-Nine" and we see a 1949 six-passenger "Mercury Eight " six-passenger coupe in the video for the song that's similar to the one James Dean's character, Jim Stark, drove in "Rebel Without a Cause". "Eight" referring to the car's two-hundred fifty-five cubic inch, "flathead" V-8 engine.
Although it goes by in the blink of an eye, about three-quarters of the way through the video we see the '49 with a "JAMES DEAN" license plate on its front end. Very cool.
We see several other Mercury's in the video but with the "b-roll" so dark and with the constant, frantic edits typical of music videos of any genre, not to mention the degraded video quality on youtube, it's all but impossible to pin-point exact model years of the cars.
There is this one good shot of the dashboard of a red, "suicide door" four-door Mercury in the video but it appears to be a customized or after market dash. Safe bet to say, though, it's a 1949-1951 Mercury. While I'm a GM girl first and foremost, with regards to 1949-1951 Merc's, I get what the song-writers and Mr. Jackson were gettin' at when they say, "I'm crazy 'bout a Mercury".
Just as well as today's automobile soliloquy is not about the Mercury's in the video per se but about this 1952 Mercury Custom. It's was for sale at a automobile consignment shop up in Grand Rapids with an ungodly asking price of some $15,000. The listing is gone now which tells me either the owner pulled it from the market or, remarkably, someone bought it.
I mention the song and the video because, well, I love the song and Alan Jackson rocks, but it's safe to say I'm, "not crazy about this Mercury". If I just made the "not crazy" comment without framing it properly beforehand it wouldn't have the obtuse impact I hope it would have.
I don't think that Alan Jackson or the song writers who penned "Mercury Blues" had this "Merc" in mind when they came up with the song. Especially in this color. Well, the writers couldn't have because they wrote the song in 1949 but I hope you get my point. Had the Ford Motor Company rolled this out in 1949 would a song have been written about it? Me thinks not.
Alan's also a "car-guy" and if us "car-guy's" have anything in common it's that most of the time we tend to have similar reactions to particular models. 1949 Mercury's are "James Dean cool" whereas most other Mercury's, save for 1968 and 1969 Cougars, like our '52 here, candidly, were most definitely not cool. Throw in 1969 and 1970 Cougar's as "cool" because I'm feeling generous today. Most post-war Ford's as well lacked the elan that many GM designs had and post-war Chrysler's were even worse. Well, up until 1955 but that's a blog for a different day.
After three very short model years in which Ford's self-baked middle child actually had an identity of its own, for 1952 they began badge-engineering Mercury's as re-bodied Lincoln's. From an operational efficiency stand-point, at least on paper, the move made sense. After all, Lincoln's were marketed as rivals of GM's luxury division, Cadillac, and what better way to amortize the cost of building the feature rich luxury-buyer targeted automobiles than to offer less expensive versions of them. Again, that works on paper.
It would have worked better if the '52's didn't look like warmed over versions of Lincoln models that didn't sell well. If Ford couldn't figure out what to do with Mercury, they really had no idea how to make Lincoln's appealing to Cadillac buyers. 1950's Lincoln's were gross attempts to out-Cadillac Cadillac and were fussy and clumsy looking. Had they instead made the 1949 Mercury's Lincoln's instead would things have been different? The world will never know. "Crazy 'bout a Lincoln" doesn't have the same ring to it either.
1950 Ford Custom DeLuxe Club Coupe
1951 Mercury Eight
1952 Mercury Custom
1952 Lincoln Capri
Above we see the familial similarity in early 1950's Ford designs and the only one, in my humble opinion, that should and actually does get any respect is the 1951 Mercury Eight. Some say James Dean drove a '51 in "Rebel" but I've deduced it was in fact a '49. And as dorky as the '52 Merc is, the 1950 Ford here makes it look positively beguiling. The Capri here is does look somewhat elegant but it has none of the presence of a 1952 Cadillac.
The axiom of "what's a Mercury" dogged the division from it's get-go as a competitor to GM's mid-priced models going back to 1939. Sometimes they were dressed down Lincoln's and other times they were dressed up Ford's. Again, save for the '49-'51's and, the Cougar;s Ford could never figure out what to do Mercury. That dogma plagued Mercury through its demise after the 2010 model year.
I ain't crazy about this Mercury.
"Mercury Blues" was written by blues musicians K.C. Douglas and Robert Geddins.
