Picture Time: More of the Mercury Villager Nautica
I’m back again. Shortly after today’s QOTD about special editions went live, I received an email back from a kind contact at Ford. She provided me with the press photos of the Mercury Villager Nautica I had requested. Since they’re so nice, and you probably haven’t seen them anywhere else, it’s Picture Time.
Feast your eyes on this tasty minivan.
It turns out I was wrong (write that down), and there was another color available for the Villager Nautica — this striking raspberry and white combination. I’m certain I haven’t seen one this color in the wild.
Mercury knew you needed somewhere to put your Bugle Boy jeans and fanny pack, so buyers were provided with this special Nautica bag, in subtle banana yellow.
And here’s that glorious two-tone interior as it looked when new. This appears to be the grey leather option.
Back to blue, showing the scale of the quite large duffel. I’ll bet I could fit twelve pairs of stone wash jeans in there.
[Images: Ford Motor Company]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
More by Corey Lewis
Comments
Join the conversation
Mom had one of these from new in 96, I got it as a hand-me-down first car in 1998. Ugly paint scheme aside, the Villager was actually a wonderful product. It was one of the first vans to have car-like driving dymanics, it was exceptionally reliable for us (we had 2 of them, in fact). I loved it. It was just big enough to fit 7 and would fit a mattress with the seats removed.
My baseball teammate's mom had one of these. One of the earlier minivans I remember with rear seat audio controls. My family, base model Plymouth Voyager with crank windows. At least it was a V6. I was from the poor part of town.