Mercury

» see mercuryvehicles.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mercury never really left North America. Ford sold it across the United States and Canada and almost nowhere else, which means that for most of the world this brand existed only as a badge you noticed on a car in an American film and never once saw on a road. That is my honest position on it. I know what a Mercury Cougar is because of what it was parked next to on screen, not because anyone I have met has owned one.

The brand was created on 4 November 1938 by Edsel Ford, who had spent years watching customers outgrow a Ford and go buy a Buick because Lincoln was too far up the list to be the next purchase. The 1939 Mercury Eight sat in that gap at $916 and sold about 65,000 units in its first year. After the war Ford folded it into a Lincoln-Mercury division and gave it the styling budget, which is how the 1949 Mercury became the car every customizer in California cut the roof off, and how James Dean ended up driving one in Rebel Without a Cause.

The trouble started with a car that was not a Mercury. Ford launched Edsel in 1958 as a fourth brand wedged into the same territory, killed it after three model years and $250 million, and in the process taught the company that the middle of its own price list was dangerous ground. Mercury spent the next fifty years there anyway. Its peak came in 1979 at close to 670,000 vehicles, on the back of the Cougar and the Marquis, and after that the volume slid for three decades while the cars underneath the badge became progressively more identical to the Fords they were priced above.

Ford announced on 2 June 2010 that it was done, as part of Alan Mulally's reduction of the company to Ford and Lincoln. Retail production of the Grand Marquis ended that October. Fleet orders ran on into the new year, and the final Mercury of any kind was built at the St. Thomas Assembly Plant in Ontario on 4 January 2011.

~ the record ~

~ the price ladder ~

The idea Mercury was built on was that a customer stays with one manufacturer for life and climbs. You buy a Ford in your twenties and a Mercury in your forties, and by the time you can afford a Lincoln the company has kept you for thirty years. It is a good theory and it held for about a generation, as long as each rung was visibly a different car underneath.

What broke it was platform sharing, and Ford did it to itself for sound accounting reasons. By the 1990s a Mercury Sable was a Ford Taurus with a light bar across the nose, and a Mercury Milan was a Ford Fusion with different seat fabric. The rung was still on the ladder and the customer could see there was nothing on it. Sales fell from 670,000 to about 92,000 by 2009 and Ford was paying for a separate dealer network and a separate advertising budget in order to sell cars it already had in the showroom next door.

~ the last one was a fleet order ~

There is something fitting about the ending and it is not sentimental. The Grand Marquis outlived every other Mercury because police departments and rental fleets kept buying the body-on-frame Panther platform long after private buyers stopped, so the brand's final years were spent as a livery car and a highway patrol cruiser. The car that closed the line on 4 January 2011 was built against a fleet order, as a 2011 model of a design that had been essentially unchanged since 1998.

Ford still owns the name and has not put it on anything since. The Cougar and the 1949 coupe hold real collector value, the Sables do not, and the dealer signs came down over the following year as the franchise agreements wound up.

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