Junkyard Find: 1977 Ford Maverick Sedan
You just don’t see Ford Mavericks and their Mercury Comet brethren on the street these days; they haven’t picked up a huge amount of collector interest and their place at the bottom of the just-above-scrap-value beater-car food chain has been replaced by the early Ford Taurus. For some reason, though, a steady trickle of Mavericks and Comets shows up in California wrecking yards. My guess, based on the 1980s and 1990s detritus I find in some of them, is that they spent a decade or three forgotten in a back yard or driveway before being sold to U-Wrench-It. So far in this series, we’ve seen this ’75 Maverick two-door, this ’75 Comet sedan, this ’77 Comet sedan, and now today’s ’77 Maverick sedan. Let’s examine this Malaise Mainstay more closely.
Back in the early 1980s, the owner of this car was willing to put the sticker that saved Ford from the biggest recall in automotive-industry history on his dash. Most of the 23 million owners of the affected vehicles opted not to uglify their dashes with these “Park-To-Reverse” stickers.
I’m not sure what an Oregon Free Ride sticker was for, but I’m guessing that neither ass, nor grass, nor ass is involved.
I couldn’t get the hood to open, but there’s about a 99.999% chance that what’s underneath is not interesting. Probably a 7-horsepower 200 L6 or a 9-horsepower 302 V8, yawn (cue enraged emails from the Maverick Jihad™, letting me know that the 200 made 96 hp and the 302 made 130 hp).
Still one hubcap left!
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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My miscellaneous Maverick memories - In the spring of '70, I went with one of my friends and his parents to trade in their green '64 Rambler 770 Wagon for a brand new '70 Maverick, one of an amazing 579,000 Mavericks sold by Ford in the extended 1970 model year. Theirs was a pretty basic unit, 2 door, auto, dark blue with retina-frying blue plaid bench seats, crappy AM-only radio, no air (of course), and non-rolling-down (pop-open only) rear windows, but meh, it was a brand new car. The other odd thing about that day (other than those plaid seats) was while on the way home there was a solar eclipse across the eastern US and Canada. I remember the sky getting very dim like the sun was going down, then after several minutes getting light again. The cool thing is, unlike most 45 year-old memories, that eclipse allows me to pin down the exact day it happened - March 7, 1970 (the same eclipse of Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" fame). Later in the '70s while I was in high school, early Mavericks were as ubiquitous in the student lot (and newly hired faculty lot) as old Hondas and Hyundais are today. In fact, my HS gf drove a '71 Maverick, once again a very basic 2-door unit with no power anything (it had what we called "Armstrong power steering"), and was equipped (or non-equipped) much like the '70 above had been. I hated it for being a gutless, buzzy six-banger that sounded like a Cessna (in retrospect it had an exhaust leak, I think), but it got us around and into assorted high school hijinks (wink wink), a fact which will forever earn it and Mavericks in general a soft spot in my heart.
Funny. I own this exact car. Same color scheme and all. Mine has 21,800 original miles. Has 250 hp straight 6. Runs like an old caddilac. Smooth over bumps. On the highway feel like you are floating on air. Power steering is so good. You can literally spin the steering wheel while turning.