Junkyard Find: 1977 Mercury Cougar

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

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.









Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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.

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  • MRF 95 T-Bird MRF 95 T-Bird on Oct 19, 2012

    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.

  • Laserwizard Laserwizard on Dec 28, 2015

    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.

  • Oberkanone My grid hurts!Good luck with installing charger locations at leased locations with aging infrastructure. Perhaps USPS would have better start modernizing it's Post offices to meet future needs. Of course, USPS has no money for anything.
  • Dukeisduke If it's going to be a turbo 4-cylinder like the new Tacoma, I'll pass.BTW, I see lots of Tacomas on the road (mine is a 2013), but I haven't seen any 4th-gen trucks yet.
  • Oberkanone Expect 4Runner to combine best aspects of new Land Cruiser and new Tacoma and this is what I expect from 2025 4Runner.Toyota is REALLY on it's best game recently. Tacoma and Land Cruiser are examples of this.
  • ArialATOMV8 All I hope is that the 4Runner stays rugged and reliable.
  • Arthur Dailey Good. Whatever upsets the Chinese government is fine with me. And yes they are probably monitoring this thread/site.
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