The Fox-bodied 1983-86 Ford LTD and Mercury Marquis are getting pretty scarce around here. However, I did catch this one last spring–the same day I discovered the Schuco 1967 Cadillac, as a matter of fact. It looked pretty decent for its age, with just one missing wheel cover and minor rust.
The local birds seemed to like it too, though the Marquis’ owner probably doesn’t appreciate that, if you know what I mean. I believe this is a 1985, judging from the taillights and wheel covers.
Here’s a 1983-84, for comparison’s sake.
image: ebay.com
If the front was visible, you would be able to see the new grille for that year, which rounded out the changes for 1985-86 before the model was discontinued in favor of the Taurus/Sable.
Essentially a restyled 1978-83 Fairmont/Zephyr, the 1983 Marquis and its LTD sibling were meant to replace the 1979-up Panthers, but when the economy recovered in ’83 and full-size cars began selling again, the biggies continued as “Grand Marquis” and “LTD Crown Victoria.”
For its first year on the market, the outgoing Zephyr was sold alongside the “downsized” Marquis. Much like the 1975 Monarch and its predecessor, the awkwardly-bumpered Comet, were sold side-by-side in 1975-77.
Initial 1983 Fox Marquises were available in your choice of a four-door sedan or station wagon (Di-Noc woodgrain optional). A 2.3L four with four speed manual was standard equipment, with the 3.3L straight six and 3.8L V6 optional. Later on, you could get your Marquis with the 5.0L V8. Of course, a Brougham trim level was available.
image: imcdb.org
I am always reminded of Beverly Hills Cop when I see one of these–the only time I remember seeing one in a movie.Who could forget the scene where Foley sends an early supper to Taggart and Rosewood in their BHPD Marquis, then incapacitates it with a banana?
Plus, when I was a kid our next-door neighbors, the Ohlweilers, had a beige LTD sedan of this vintage. It replaced a similarly beige Fairmont sedan. I was about five when they got the LTD, and I remember liking it a lot better than the boxy Fairmont. In about 1990-91 the LTD was replaced with a fully loaded Taurus LX sedan, in a rather attractive cinnamon color.
image: ebay.com
Have we still not done a full CC on one of these cars? If I ever catch up with the two-tone navy blue over light blue 1983-84 Marquis Brougham I will correct that, but every time I’ve seen it, it’s been on the move! Until then, this one will have to do.
Wasn’t there a propane-powered version of the LTD available at some point?
Yes there was. I had a late-’80s Consumer Guide used auto buying guide book that noted the availability of this option. I don’t recall that it was all that particularly popular. Of course, around these parts the car itself wasn’t all that popular.
I think those were for fleet only, from what I recall Ford was test marketing the propane option to fleet buyers.
Yes, there was an LPG model available and at least here in Soviet Canuckistan it was not fleet only. I actually considered buying one for our taxi fleet to try it out. The problem was it was so gutless it was practically dangerous. When a gas engine is adapted to LPG without raising the compression, there is a net loss of about 10% in power, and hte 2.3 was not exactly a powerhouse to begin with. This doesn’t matter much in a big V-8, but in a four banger, it mattered. Ford would have been much better off to do the boat anchor 3.3 six in LPG.
In the end I didn’t buy it because it was so under-powered. I remember the salesman playing the “somebody else has made an offer on it, so snap it now now!” game and being horribly disappointed when I didn’t buy.
The rest of the car was actually not bad. Ford was on its “Quality is Job One” kick at the time and the car seemed nicely finished and put together.
Maybe it wasn’t fleet only in Canada, I think you guys have a larger proportion of CNG cars on the road, but I think it was fleet in the US, you could also get the Crown Vic with the CNG option too, Escorts and Rangers as well.
CNG is okay for utility companies and the like, but the problems with it were range and the bulky tanks. The GM B-body was perfect for LPG. The stock gas tank was removed and three forty litre tanks in tandem were installed. This gave 110 litres of real storage, which was good for at least 500 km of stop and go driving. That was often double what the car would do on a normal shift. With CNG, it was hard to get more than 200 km, meaning the drivers would push the envelope and run out. This meant a couple of hours’ down time and a tow bill. Finally, it was very easy to change a 4 barrel GM car to LPG.
With high gasoline prices, LPG is coming back for city vehicles such as plumbers, etc, as the operating costs are dirt once you have done the conversion. It sells for about $0.80 a litre here in Vancouver, vs gas at $1.30. CNG is not nearly as popular.
I remember my friend worked for a company that was approached by Ford for a real sweetheart deal to upgrade their fleet to all propane or something or other, they did want a log record to be kept from all the drivers with copies sent back to Ford, odd.
According to the one source I can find, the propane 2.3 was rated exactly the same as the gasoline version. That may just be laziness or untruthfulness in action, but it does say that the compression ratio was raised to 10:1 on those engines. Maybe they just felt too slow because either way, it was an 88HP engine moving a decent amount of car through a slushbox. I think these actually were available to the general public in the US, it’s just that few people bought them aside from utility companies and government agencies.
We have CNG Civics at work (never got to drive one, though) and that’s what all the local buses run on as well. I can’t speak to why, exactly, CNG is so much more popular here, but it is. Maybe it’s cheaper or there’s some tax incentives in the US, or maybe it’s just a result of it’s use mainly in urban centers where the limited range isn’t as big of an issue. I notice that electric vehicles are also becoming more and more popular in roles often filled by CNG, so that may be it.
There’s a locksmith here that uses a few CNG Ford Contours for service calls. I had some pictures of one, but my phone just peaced out and I lost all my recent finds (not many, thankfully!)
In the meantime, this one will have to fill in:
And with that, the Fairmont/Zephyr finally became good looking. It’s remarkable how the few design tweaks transformed a dowdy car into a handsome car. I know, I say this every time this car shows up on this site, but I still can’t get over how true it is.
I actually prefer the look of the original Fairmont/Zephyr to the later shovel nose Foxes. The Merc does wear the snout better than the LTD though.
In 1984, a good friend of mine was looking for a new car to replace his 1977 Chevrolet Malibu Classic. The Lincoln-Mercury Dealer on Independence Boulevard in Charlotte, NC (Burroughs Lincoln Mercury or Queen City L-M??) had daily advertisements in The Charlotte Observer for these cars, loaded up at a very discounted price. All colors to choose from they advertised. I accompanied my friend and we went among the several rows of these Marquis looking. He choose one in beige with beige vinyl seats. I still remember that car and how smooth and quiet it was with the V6. It felt tight with no squeaks and rattles and it held up rather well, reaching 100,000 miles plus over the next three years until my friend traded for a new Nissan Maxima. I know these cars have their distractors but I always thought, for the time, that it was a nice car.
Mr. Bill
Hamlet, NC
I remember that for $9999 you got a fully loaded Marquis Brougham, with power everything, nice radio, etc. At the time, that was a pretty good deal, and you saw a lot of them around.
PMC: That’s it I’m sure… $9,999.00. It was pretty loaded, power windows, driver’s seat, wire wheels. A nice car for the price…
Mr. Bill
Hamlet, NC
At one time these and the LTD seemed to be all over the place. This is a good catch on the Mercury version.
A high school teacher of mine had a Zephyr that he kept for his two daughters to drive and he then bought a Marquis. I rode in it a time or two and despite it having a slew of miles on it, by the late ’80s it was still looking great and rode terrific. Mr. Bill is right on how they were free of squeaks and rattles.
Despite the oldest one of these now being 31, I still find these quite fresh in appearance and do not look nearly as dated as some of their contemporaries of the time.
“Despite the oldest one of these now being 31”
I could have gone all day long without you saying that a car from the 80s is over 30 years old. 🙁
+1
The problem was Ford’s reverse engineered 3.8 V-6 guzzled gas at a prodigious rate, at least as bad as the 5.0 V-8. They also had intake manifold gasket problems, which they must have copied from GM’s 60′ V-6 family!
I’m not saying it’s a bad-looking car, but it’s totally dated. Totally a design of its time.
The woodie wagon in the last picture is almost the twin of one I owned, only mine had the broughamier dark brown interior and fake wire wheelcovers.
I bought it at about 5 years old and 106K on the odo and didn’t pay much for it, but came to really like it. With the 3.8/ 3 speed C5, it was a torquey little thing. However, the wagon’s teensy gas tank gave it a very short range. I liked the way it drove better than the 85 Crown Vic that followed it.
JP,
What year was your Marquis? My parents’ was an ’85 sedan and was as Brougham-y as you could get.
My mom and dad did enjoy the combination of the 3.8 V6/C5, however, their biggest gripe with the car was its small gas tank. Heck, even my ’91 Volvo, with its 16-gallon tank, can go farther on a gallon of gas than that Marquis.
Mine was one of the rare 1986 models that was a short model year until the Taurus/Sable got rolling. I recall looking it up once somewhere and there were only something like 2 or 3 thousand Marquis wagons made for 86. Mine was loaded with power options. The gas tank in the wagon was something like 11 gallons, abnormally small for a car with a 3.8L engine. I still remember that with in-city driving I had to fill up at around 175 miles, and even on a trip I could never go beyond 225 miles. I bought mine around 1991, and by then these were universally unloved in the market and their prices showed it. Bought mine at a big tent sale that east side Indianapolis new car dealers were putting on at a mall. After a protracted negotiation (like an hour or two) I drove off for $2675. One of the best car deals I ever drove. In the summer of 93, my Mom replaced her 85 Crown Vic with 65K on the odo and I could not pass that one up. But I never liked driving it as much as I liked the Fox Marquis.
I was wondering if the tank size was 11 gallons on all models, or if they had an option of a bigger tank, especially if you had a V8 (which I would guess would use fuel even faster than the 6). I guess hauling around “extra” gas in the form of a bigger tank would hurt gas milage slightly due to the extra weight, but even some small cars like a Fiat had 11 gallon tanks, which is less than half the size of some of the 23 gallon tanks in big cars back then.
I wonder if the preceeding cars (Granada, and before that Fairmont) also had smaller tanks, or if they started with this model? I’d guess the engines and fuel economy would have been about the same with the same engine on earlier models (6 or 8) so other than lugging around less weight, I can’t imagine why they made the tank smaller for this model. Maybe they were in a kind of cycle where we are now that they thought price of fuel would go so high that they would need to get every 0.1 MPG credit towards CAFE, so they did small things like make the tanks smaller. I wonder if less weight affects the MPG measurement for CAFE?
Going by memory here, but I believe that the tank in the sedan was larger. The wagon’s smaller tank was a packaging issue, as the spare tire was carried below the wagon’s floor. There also may have been an underfloor storage compartment too, I don’t recall. It would not surprise me that the teeny tank was in all Fox wagons.
Tom,
Thanks for profiling this long-forgotten series of Fox-body cars. My parents bought a new Marquis Brougham in the summer of ’85 and I still remember going down to the dealership with them to pick it up.
The Marquis was the most luxurious car we had owned up to that point – it was purchased after going through a hand-me-down ’72 Plymouth Duster and a God-awful ’81 Ford Granada. What I remember most about it was its digital clock in the center of the dash, which I thought was a cool feature for the time, and its cassette radio. Since I was a mere tot at the time, the cassette deck was a requirement for us so that my mom could play my kids’ books on tape during road trips and read along to them.
Alas, the Marquis was less than stellar in the reliability department and was traded in on an ’87 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera two years later. That car was also not the most reliable thing on the planet either – in the early ’90s, it was discarded in favor of our first Volvo. We’ve been a Volvo family ever since.
I always loved these cars, with their odd synergy of antiquated and contemporary styling, though I’ll readily confess to having a soft spot for Foxes after once having a long-term relationship with a 1988 Thunderbird Sport. Sadly, the last of the Fairmont trilogy were rust-prone like other Foxes and all but disappeared from the northeast in the early 1990’s. As a recent transplant to the south, I assumed I would stumble across the odd LTD/Marquis, but alas Foxes are just as scarce in Dixie, at least in comparison to their G-body counterparts, which I still regularly see in use as daily drivers. Most of these cars were sold with the 3.8, so I’m guessing it was the head gaskets eventually did them in.
Tom, the only 5.0 powered Marquis was the extremely rare LTS, which I believe was only marketed in Canada. The 5.0 was available in the LTD either through the police package or the LX, which was sold in 84-85. Both were sold in small numbers and are also scarce finds today. Would love to one day find an LX and convert it to EFI, as other enthusiasts have done.
Whoops! I was using both the LTD and Marquis sales brochures when checking for engine choices.
Reviving an old thread here 🙂 … you’re right about the Marquis LTS being rare, only 134 were built and as you say all were for the Canadian market. I have recently purchased one that somehow migrated to Ohio in the late ’80s. It’s a rough barn find, but I’m bound and determined to put it as close to new as possible. Ran a Marti Report on it, it’s one of only 24 built in black. It is unknown how many still exist, only 2 are known for sure.
We could wonder what if Ford had let the mid-size LTD/Marquis soldiering a couple of more years with more aerodynamics tweaks? Just imagine a mid-size LTD/Marquis getting the same redesign then the full-size Town Car got in 1990 and the full-size Crown Victoria/Grand Marquis got for the 1992 model year. However it might had delayed the Taurus project…
Funny you should bring up the Marquis in Beverly Hills Cop. What bugs me every time I watch that movie, is that although the car is in fact a Mercury Marquis, it is referred to as a “beige Ford”. Something only us car people catch I’m sure.
I always thought these looked weird. The first one I came across was in Houston, TX, circa 1990, and said “FIRE MARSHAL” on the side; I pitied the poor fire marshal, and thought that he had to live in constant envy of his Crown Vic- and Chevy Caprice-driving counterparts in the police department. Anway, to me, the way the front and rear fascias slant towards each other always looked pretty ungainly; but I realize beauty is only skin deep, and have read someplace that these supposedly handled quite well for the times. Well, I’ve never sat in one, so I wouldn’t know.
But! I drove their digital equivalent in the retro-80s video game “GTA Vice City”. If the real thing can handle as well and take as much punishment as the pixel version can, heck, I’ll admire them despite their looks.
I’ve seen a few LTD (sedan and wagon versions) in the flesh but never caught the Marquis anywhere but eBay. If I ad unlimited funds I’d love to use all the Fox body tricks to make one into a 5.0 powered sleeper. A Mustang in Granddad’s Clothes.
Imagine how a low-profile supercharger equipped 5.0 with a quiet exhaust would be. With stock wheels, hubcaps and sticky rubber. Total sleeper. You’d have to upgrade the transmission and rear end with heavy duty parts, tho.
Paxton Supercharged 302+T-5+9in rear FTW!
Make mine a woody with a 6 please,another car I never paid attention to when new.
My dad had a rental ’83 LTD during one of the many times his magnetic ’81 Concord was in the body shop (it attracted accidents…). One trip we to that car on was a drive from Cleveland to Baltimore and back. I did most of the driving and pretty much fell in love with the car, somewhat odd for a 21 year old LOL. Wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, as it was an early build powered by the venerable 3.3L straight six but I recall it got rather decent fuel economy.
The boat anchor 3.3 was at least reliable, and made decent torque. The same cannot be said about the 3.8 V-6. Horrible motor.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say horrible. I had an ’88 T Bird some years ago that was a great runner that also got exceptional fuel economy, exceeding 30 mpg on extended road trips. Traded it in with 99k and she still drove just fine as long as you didn’t use the a/c… then the temp gauge would peg. 100k out of head gaskets on a 3.8 isn’t all that bad considering, and Subie owners seem to find that acceptable.
By comparison, an Oldsmobile 307 would last the life of a TAXI, that being 700,000 + km without ever doing ANYTHING to it. My brother got over a million on one. A Chevrolet 350 would easy do 500,000 km.
We were doing head gaskets and intake gaskets on Ford 3.8’s just out out of warranty. They seemed to be copying GM as it was 12 hours of retail labour and this a huge money maker. We made quite a bit on the, but nothing like the haul we got on the GM 3.4.
Taxi use is the roughest test any car will ever have.
As for Subaru owners, they are an interesting breed, kind of like iClones. They will put up with anything because they love the brand so much
The taillights on these bugged me to no end when they first came out. Having the gray strip on the top just looked like such a cheap solution to attempt to make the lights different from the LTD, while using the same space. At least the later restyle improved them slightly by making them all red, even if the top half was still just a reflector.
Say what you will about cars with shared platforms today, but at least the styling differences are more substantial than what the manufacturers used to try to fool the public with.
When I first saw a photo – the photo in this article, actually – I thought the top half was smoked and I thought that looked pretty cool, especially for the 1980s. Pretty disappointed to find it was just plastic, although it would nicely differentiate the car at night.
My father-in-law had a Ford LTD version, rather well tricked out, metallic green with a green interior. I drove it quite often, as he was always more that happy to drop the driving duties on me when we’d go out for dinner on Sundays. Nothing terribly exciting about the car (then again, Ray was a typical 4-wheeled appliance buyer) but it drove decently, was comfortable, and seemed to be quite reliable. I remember my wife’s parents had the car up thru our divorce.
That’s how you knew you were in Beverly Hills, even the cops drove a Mercury. I remember there used to be an older couple down the street from a friends house that had a wagon version of the LTD in their driveway for years. I almost bought a police package version one of these, with the Fairmont dog dishes and the “certified” speedometer, I haven’t seen another police spec LTD since.
I like the old styling of the Fairmont better. I remember these as slow and having the mosst uncomfortable seats of any car l ever road in. And the should of called it something else. This is not a real marquis. The mini cougar at least looked like a baby marquis. This was an ugly car. The 3.3 was slow but reliable. The 3.8 was junk.
These were incredibly popular back in the day. I remember thinking OK so this is what Ford thinks will be the new full-size sedan moving forward. It was depressing to think that but I did. Then the Taurus came out and all was forgiven.
Still I liked these LTDs. You wouldn’t think starting with the Fairmont and making it more aero would work but it did. The narrow width gave it a fresh, lean look.
My dad bought a Marquis wagon of this generation, but it wasn’t so good on slippery roads. He traded it in for an ’86 AWD Subaru GL wagon and has driven its successors ever since. (I didn’t know about the small gas tank issue until now, and that may have been a factor too.)
A transition car from the brougham era to the aero era. It was 1961 again in that sense when the fin era was moving towards ’60s elegance. With all the awkward growing pains again.
And this transition was done on a tight budget. The doors retained the Fairmont / Zephyr sculpting which didn’t blend well with the updated sheet metal ahead of and behind the wheels. The differentiation between the LTD and the Marquis was limited to some cheap looking awkward plastic pieces in the tail lights – and the grill.
These cars were for Ford loyalists that just didn’t care much about how their cars looked. Ford struggled with how to do the Fox platform after the success of the Fairmont / Zephyr. The list of awkward and not highly successful cars is impressive: T-Bird, Cougar, Gen II Granada, LTD, Marquis, Continental. I was not a big fan of the Fox Mustang, but it did get better with time.
It took until the ’83 T-Bird and Cougar to get it right.
Anyone else remember the Bondurant ads for the LTD LX? With mods available these days for all things Fox body, you could really have quite a sleeper, even more so with the Mercury.
When I was shopping new cars in 1985, I wonder why I didn’t drive one of these. Probably because I hated their looks, then because they came only with the automatic that required a detuned version of the 5.0 (175 horsepower instead of the 210 that you could get in the stick shift Mustang GT.) I wish I would have looked harder for one of these during their cheap used car years, though. As much as I liked my 86 Marquis wagon, one of these with the V8 would have been a real hoot.
Looking back, the use of the Fox platform from the late 70’s to the mid-80’s was a bit schizo. Aside from the Mustang (Capri back then), they went from the Fairmont/Zephyr to the T-Bird/Cougar coupes, the Fox-based Granada/Cougar 2/4-doors and wagon to the Lincoln Continental and subsequently the LTD/Marquis 4-doors and wagons. It’s as if Ford was throwing darts and hoping something would stick.
No one publicly understood it at the time but Ford came much closer to death than realized during the late 70s early 80s. The early 80s recession almost brought them to bankruptcy but they tried to learn from it.
The Fox platform became their “K-car” for a short time while they tried to make enough money to afford development of the Taurus.
I drove a brown 86 Ford wagon making deliveries for a bank in the late eighties. As I remember it was pretty decently dressed up. If you braced yourself and really pushed it, the car could handle a twisty country road quite well.
A friend in high school inherited a grandparent’s 10-year-old 1985 LTD with 38K miles. It was an immaculate powder blue survivor. He affectionately referred to it as “The Luxury Sedan.”
The “LS” (and its operator) limped home from college after their freshman year a little worse for wear.
In the 1980s I worked for the local electric utility company. They had a fleet of over 300 cars, 50% LTDs and the other 50% Malibus. One time I had to travel to a power plant construction site and the fleet people gave me an LTD. At the time the Malibu was the favored car so I was not overly excited with the LTD. In the days that I had it I found it to be a very nice driver and by no means slow. I thought they had V8s just like the Malibus. It was a 90 mile commute home so I’d tried to go as fast as I could and the LTD had more than enough power to maintain 80+ mph speeds on the highway. One day I left work at the same time as the shift change occurred for the construction workers. The routes from the construction site back to the highway were all two lane country roads and at this particular time unusually crowded. I was trying to pass a p/u truck on the left lane and as I got next to him he tried to drive me off the road. I veered to the left to avoid him. Now I had two wheels on the dirt shoulder and getting pretty close to the deep ditch that ran along the road. I remember flooring the LTD and shooting away from the murderous construction worker and his p/u truck. You’d think Accountants had boring jobs!
Is the passenger compartment on these any different than the Fairmont? Are the doors any different? I’ve always assumed the answer to both questions was no, that it’s just a compact Fairmont with extended front and rear clips…which I found unfortunate if true. Passing off an old, basic (though likeable) compact as a new full-size car was really lazy and cynical.
The interior was horrible. The taxi company had a few of these. They were like Fairmont’s basically but had low seats with a curved back. They were so uncomfortable after a couple hours ones back hurt so bad it was hard to walk. And I have no back problems. Worst seats of any car l ever drove. Even worse than driving a lesabre with no interior sitting on the spare tire. Outside was ugly and the engine choice was slow with the 3.3 or 3.8 that always broke down. It was far worse to drive than the gm competition with the non opening windows in the back and the seats that alwaws were Broken. Sad this made a gm car look good. The Chrysler’s and Dodge’s were so much better. If ford had made this the full sized car they would have deserved to go under. I hate this car. I truly despise it. It was a horrible car to drive. Awful to look at. An insult to the name marquis or ltd. This car is far uglier than a Fairmont which was an honest but basic car and lacked the style of even the second generation Granada or cougar sedan. This car could only make a chiropractor happy for the backs it destroyed. Truly a horrid turd of a car. I’m surprised anyone ever bought one. It is inferior in every way to a diplomat or fifth avenue m body and even worse than a v6 seald rear window gm nidsized with a collapsed seat. Ford missed the marq on this. Again I hate this car. Hate its looks and seats and engines. It was fancier then a Fairmont but came off as cheap and chintzy. When I worked for the cab company I drove a 78 volare slant 6 and it was like driving automotive perfection compared to these. Thankfully they are all but gone. This car should never have been built. An automotive devils spawn evil from the moment of conception.
If there are any left please consider having it crushed. It would possibly look better with a Fairmont front clip.
So tell us how you really feel about this car.
After ownership of both a 1979 Fairmont and later a 1984 LTD I can sympathize. My 1981,85 and 87 Cutlass supreme sedans were like driving Cadillac’s in comparison. The 2.3 was miserably slow in these cars and the 200 L-6 drank gas like it was going out of style in the 79 Fairmont. The tiny useless small gas tank really limited the range, especially on the wagons. Road noise was horrible on the 79 and only a little better on the 84. The 84’s 4 speed transmission went south with but 80K miles and soon after the head gasket killed the engine with a cracked head. Overall a pretty interesting car but not one of Ford’s finest hours.
We had a 1984 version with the carbureted V-6. We towed a trailer with it, I drove the hell out of it when I wasn’t driving my Cougar, and it still made it to 120K miles before blowing the head gasket, at which point we bought the first of five Sables and a few other Cougars. The seats were a huge improvement over the flat seats many American cars still used. The Lincoln-Mercury dealership was a far cry better than the local Ford dealer two. I wish I had a photo of it. It had a silver top, burgundy bottom, the faux wire wheels, and it did its best to merge the new aero styling with all the broughamy features my dad always liked. I don’t recall having a short tank range, but then my dad filled it up every other day when he’d by his cigarettes. All these years later, I still wish there had been a de Sade edition.