The Truth About Cars » Mercury Cougar

Junkyard Find: 1977 Mercury Cougar

Murilee Martin — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:00:48 +0000

We make fun of the personal luxury coupe now, just as we make fun of leisure suits, WIN buttons, and Freakies cereal. Still, the rest of the world (except perhaps Australia) never experienced the glory of the huge, inefficient, vaguely sporty coupe with floaty ride and deep-tufted velour interior, and this is their loss.
You’re not going to see this no-apologies shade of green on any car interior made after about 1983, and that’s everybody’s loss.
You don’t want to know the horsepower output of this 351M engine . It will just make all of us feel vaguely depressed (hint: it’s less— a lot less— than the base four-cylinder in the 2013 Camry). The good news is that it churned out sufficient torque to get this 3,800-pound brute moving pretty well.
Ride-Engineered!
This car or the Cordoba?

Chrysler had Ricardo Montalban. Mercury had Cheryl Tiegs.

Junkyard Find: 1997 Mercury Cougar XR7 With Florida-Style Faux-vertible Option

Murilee Martin — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:00:33 +0000

When I saw this car at a Denver self-service yard, I had to wonder if Ford really sank so low in the late 1990s as to make this godawful crypto-laundau roof a factory-installed option on the MN12 XR7. I haven’t been able to find any references to such an abomination in any of my reference books, so it’s probably a safe assumption that we’re looking at an aftermarket conversion.
Not that we’re dealing with one of the better-looking iterations of the Cougar nameplate here.
The MN12 was a big leap into the future from the Fox Platform Cougar, and you can tell by the spoiler that Ford had embraced 1990s style for real.
OK. Florida. That explains the roof.

Junkyard Find: 1994 Mercury Cougar XR7 “Prowler”

Murilee Martin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:00:52 +0000

When the Cougar went from the Fox platform to the MN12 platform for the 1989 model year, it got an independent rear suspension and a longer wheelbase for even more personal luxury. The ’89-97 Cougar had style, and thus the Prowler Edition XR7 makes perfect sense.
Other than a bunch of dudes who have named their Mustang-based early Cougars “Da Prowler” on their websites, a ~~45-second~~ painstaking Google search doesn’t turn up any reference to Prowler Cougars. The Standard Catalog makes no mention of a factory “Prowler package,” and the Special Edition Cougars site covers only Fox Cougars. Still, the lettering and spoiler look a little too professional to have been done by some guy with gold paint and a suitcase of Milwaukee’s Best; I’m guessing the Prowler XR7 was a dealer-installed setup.
This Cougar landed in a Denver wrecking yard in more or less fully-used-up condition.
Ford didn’t really think the XR7 would be stealing many sales from BMW, IRS or not, but drum brakes on a mid-90s car marketed as being at least somewhat sporty?
Still, it is a Prowler.

Junkyard Find: 1978 Mercury Cougar

Murilee Martin — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 14:00:11 +0000

The Cougar name has been slapped on so many different Mercurized (Mercurated?) Fords that it gets hard to keep them straight. I never much cared for the over-gingerbreaded Mustang-based version, but the big Thunderbird-based late-70s Cougar seems properly Mercurial.

I found this one in my local self-service wrecking yard, parked tail-to-tail with the Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Press Bronco that we saw a while back. Check out that “Quartz Electronic” clock with calendar function! Sure, it probably stopped working by 1980, but I’m still tempted to buy it for my collection of vintage car clocks.

Remember those weird plastic-coated “mag” wheels Ford liked so well during the Malaise Era?

This one has the optional 166-horsepower 400M engine, which made a respectable 318 lb-ft of torque. It was quite thirsty, but got all that luxury moving pretty well.

And hey, Cheryl Tiegs did the ads for it!