Junkyard Find: 1977 Mercury Cougar
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.
This car or the Cordoba?
Chrysler had Ricardo Montalban. Mercury had Cheryl Tiegs.
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, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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Back in the mid-80's I bought a 75 Cougar XR-7 351 2v with most options, in silver with Magnum 500 wheels,maroon landau roof,matching two-tone interior buckets, console and gauge pkg. I bought it to replace my 70 Mustang coupe w/302 2v which had 200k on it and was getting worn. The Cougar did not handle as well as the more nimble and taunt pony car but was still ok for a Disco-era personal luxury coupe. After a year and normal maintenance I sold it for the same $600 that I paid for it due to it starting to have a rear main seal leak.
Say what you will about those 1970's Ford "intermediate" boats - they were good for over 200,000 miles and built like tanks (and drank gas like one too). We had a 1973 Torino wagon with 225,000 miles and it was still going - Mom got tired of it and sold it for a 1989 T-Bird which she absolutely loved. I kept that Torino looking like new and it took forever to polish and was because of its size.