#maverick

It’s no secret that Ford has a compact, unibody pickup coming down the product pipeline, what with well-camouflaged prototypes seen by photographers and the admission from the company that a small trucklet is something it feels is worthwhile pursuing.

A small truck based on the same platform underpinning the Escape and Euro-market Focus might well prove a valuable addition to the company’s crowded utility lineup, but we now have a fairly solid piece of evidence that this product will resurrect a bit of the past.

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huge amount of collector interest and their place at the bottom of the just-above-scrap-value beater-car food chain has been replaced by the early Ford Taurus.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.

With a Ford Maverick sedan as yesterday’s Junkyard Find, it seemed only right that we follow up with the Maverick’s Mercury sibling (which I photographed in the same junkyard, on the same day). Today’s Malaise Era Ford is rough but more complete than yesterday’s car, so let’s crank up >one of the few good pop songs of 1977 and study this phenomenon.

There was once a time when Mavericks (and their Mercury Comet siblings) were among the most often-seen vehicles on American streets. Being such a cheap and homely car (and built during one of Detroit’s build-quality low points), however, the Maverick just wasn’t loved enough for many examples to be spared from The Crusher when they got a little frayed around the edges. In this series so far, we’ve seen this ’75 Maverick two-door, this ’75 Comet sedan, and now today’s ’73 Maverick four-door.

The Maverick (and its Mercury sibling, the Comet) was once one of the most numerous cars on American roads. From a period extending from 1970 through about the middle 1980s, the Maverick was everywhere, much as the Taurus is today. It was a cheap, simple machine, based on the same outdated but sturdy and well-understood-by-mechanics chassis design that Ford used beneath Falcons, Mustangs, Granadas, you name it, going back to the early 1960s. The Maverick is just about extinct now, other than a few kept alive by collectors; these days, I might see one every year or so at self-service junkyards. That makes this one (spotted at a yard in Northern California last week) a special Junkyard Find.