Junkyard Find: 1997 Mercury Cougar XR7 With Florida-Style Faux-vertible Option
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.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
I own a 95 T-Bird LX 4.6 V8. A few years back when I bought it to replace my 87 T-Bird I did consider a 89-97 Cougar. I am a big fan of these. Basically a stretched personal luxury Mustang GT with Cobra IRS. Insurance is a heck of a lot less too. Plenty of decent ones out there but for some odd reason a heck of a lot of them have sim-con or landau roofs. Something I loath. They are ugly and useless. I am used to seeing them on my visits to So. Fla where they populate the parking lots for the early bird special. The T-Birds for sale; hardly any had them. And this is in the NY metro area where as DaveinChina aptly points out "My thinking is that this vehicle came from New Jersey, during that time period they were putting all kinds of faux-landau tops on anything remotely considered american luxury. And the jersey-italian segment of the population bought them in droves." I once asked a auto body shop about sim-con removal. It's do able but at a cost.
I believe I've seen these labeled as "Caliente" packages as well. A while back I picked a perfect set of opera windows from a 1990 Lincoln Town Car to replace mine (deteriorated rubber) because they were "preserved" behind a fake carriage roof conversion. I was somewhat shocked to see just how bad the cars are butchered that receive these conversions. On 1990-1997 Town Car, they take the seam filler where the roof meets either rear quarter, and cut it in half for some reason. Then, they squirt 9-15 dollops of windshield adhesive on the roof. Anything goes on the sides. Then to top it all off (no pun intended), they run screws directly into the sheetmetal at the base. Those decorative "snaps" aren't just there for show. This is usually where the rust starts first, at least here in the south. I can't believe people actually paid money for this. I understand in some cases, if a car sat on the lot for six months or so it received the "presidential" treatment.