Is it better to buy a fancy version of a cheap car or a cheap version of a fancy car? Here we have a beguilingly plain survivor that urges you to consider the latter. We’ll take a look at this uncommon sedan and later I’ll try to answer that question as well as compare the Monterey to its contemporary competition.
Our subject car is a Monterey, which if you were shopping for Mercurys in 1965, meant the bottom of three full-sized series. Monterey wasn’t always the cheapest Mercury. The Monterey name was first used on a special 1950 model made to compete with the new pillarless hardtop coupes available from GM and Chrysler. Mercury hoped to confuse people about why a “hardtop convertible” had gotten that name. It could mean a fabric top instead of pillarless windows, right? This legerdemain would have to do until Mercury could develop a true hardtop for 1952 (though the stopgap solution actually sold pretty well).
1952. Unusual combo of drawings and photography in these Mercury ads
Monterey would serve as the flagship model in all body styles from 1952-54, then get demoted to midlevel model from 1955-56, down to entry level in 1957-60, back to top level in 1961-63, then dropped once again to entry level from 1964-1974. Confused yet?
Fancifully exaggerated proportions not standard equipment
I would imagine customers, as well, were pretty confused at the time. What Mercury hoped was clear, though, was that Mercury was the affordable car built “in the Lincoln Continental tradition.” That was their latest ad theme for 1965 and meant to be inclusive of all big Mercurys, no matter the model or trim level even though most of the advertising featured the top Park Lane models like the one above.
To emphasize this idea, Mercury seems to have quite intentionally given the Mercury a very similar grille to the Lincoln. The tail treatment is somewhat similar, too (compare with the picture below). Mechanically and platform-wise Mercurys were still Fords, both division’s full-sizers getting a new body and chassis for 1965 with new suspension design in the front and coil springs in the rear for the first time (not in the Lincoln Continental tradition!)
The rear is overall cribbed from the Lincoln, except for the taillights. Those remind me a bit of the 63-64 Cadillac.
The marketing folks wanted you to think upscale, even on the base Monterey as seen in the vacation resort brochure scene above. Looks pretty upscale to me!
In the real world, maybe not so much. Perhaps the reason for looking so downscale here, besides almost six decades of age, is that the Monterey I encountered is not only the lowest model line but also a completely base car. I haven’t spotted anything optional on this car, with the exception of newer whitewall tires which provide the thinnest of lingerie on this stripper (and she may not have even worn that from the factory). Full wheel covers were an option.
Check out the Spartan accommodations (by modern standards, at least). Carpet and heater were standard, but the blank plate indicates no optional radio. The original owner considered vent windows adequate air conditioning, even in Texas. Three-speed manual transmission will get you where you need to go. There can’t be many surviving full-sized 65 Mercurys with that!
What did a buyer get in a base Monterey that might justify the premium over a Ford or other low-priced brand? For one thing he got a large car with a 123 inch wheelbase no matter which full-size model was chosen (except for wagons, which got the same 119 inch wheelbase as all full-size Fords).
How does that compare to the cheapest full-size four-door sedans from other medium-price makes? Oldsmobile and Buick had the same wheelbase, while Pontiac and Dodge had 121 inches. All had similarly minimal standard equipment levels.
Interior space was quite roomy but no more so than a big Ford since the extra wheelbase length was all behind the rear seat. But the trunk was a bit longer.
Monterey also gave the buyer a 250hp 378lb-ft 390c.i. FE V8 standard. Fords naturally came with a six standard and getting a 390 would be a $246 option. This is an internet photo, as I was not able to pop the hood on the curbside car and don’t know if it had the optional power brakes or steering. Based on the rest of the car, I’d bet it doesn’t.
Oldsmobile came with a 260hp 330c.i. V8 (60c.i. smaller) and cost $156 more. Buick came with a 210hp 300c.i.V8 (90c.i. smaller) and cost $166 more. Pontiac and Dodge came with engines similar to Mercury and cost $30 less, but remember they had a two inch shorter wheelbase (256hp 389c.i. in Pontiac, 270hp 383c.i. in Dodge).
I found this car in Burton, Texas, approximately 15 miles from what I presume to be the dealer that first sold it. I couldn’t find any online reference to Rankin Motors, so I couldn’t confirm if was a Mercury dealer in 1965. The pictures make it seem like this is a curbside find, and was in the literal sense, but actually it was displayed as part of the annual Burton Cotton Gin Festival which includes a small car show among other attractions. The Mercury was said to have 23k miles with no other history given and I unfortunately did not see an owner nearby.
The paint, body, and interior look untouched to me. Not immaculate, but who is at 59 years of age? It’s sometimes said that black is the absence of color, but I would submit that a lightly faded 60’s beige is the real absence of color.
It seems that a Mercury Monterey was a reasonable value compared to the other medium-priced brands, but what about the opening question: is a base Mercury a better choice than a top-model Ford? 1965 happened to be the first year for Ford’s LTD, a landmark car that started 10-15 years of “luxury” replacing “sporty” as the dominant trend in popular cars. The Monterey stickered at $2782 with no options, while the LTD started at $3245 for the 4-door [hardtop], $463 more than the Monterey. LTD came with an automatic and V8, but only a 200hp 289. A 390 would cost you an extra $137 and things like AC, vinyl roof, and power brakes, steering, windows, etc. were still extra cost.
The choice would have come down to what you valued most. Size was status in the 1960s. If you wanted the extra size that came with the Merc, even with the $190 Merc-O-Matic tranny, a Monterey was $273 less than an LTD. If the pillarless body was important to you, a Monterey hardtop sedan with auto was still $137 less. If the LTD’s extra chrome trim or nicer upholstery were important to you, you might have done well to step up to the Montclair hardtop with auto, which would cost only $90 more than an LTD.
Personally, I would have gone with either the Monterey or the Montclair over any higher level Ford. In real estate the saying goes, “it’s better to have the cheapest house on a nice block than the nicest house on a cheap block.” The same logic applies with cars, and I’d rather have the less common Merc than the ubiquitous Ford.
photographed in Burton, Texas April 20, 2024
related reading:
Curbside Classic: 1965 Ford LTD – It Launched The Great Brougham Epoch by PN
Curbside Classic: 1973 Mercury Monterey Custom – A Great Name’s Last Ride By J P Cavanaugh
Nice find, nice pix. I’m always fascinated by mid-priced cars without the trimmings. Most mid-priced brands continued offering manual into the 60s, even though buyers were already gone in the 50s. For instance, only 3% of ’57 Dodges had manual, but Dodge kept offering it for another 10 years.
I love strippo cars (and unloved humans and cats)
I remember dealers ordering one (1) zero option car to put in a newspaper ad, to bring people to their door.
From my experience with similar Fords, if this did not have power steering I think it would have had a different (thicker) steering wheel.
Also not to be critical but the unibody Conti and T-Birds had leaf springs. Cost or to spread the load stresses?
Not sure
It’s hard to imagine this car without power steering, but there must have been at least a few made that way. I should look into that steering wheel factor.
Good catch on the suspension. I should have remembered that! I corrected the article.
Jon, your research into prices and options makes this article a good piece of history. As for the total essay, love it. Relatives’ relatives of mine were an older couple who had the next level up two-door hardtop. It had a few options including power brakes and steering. The grandchildren loved driving it because it would accelerate rapidly.
Love the boxy design compared to today’s jelly bean look.
Could hold an entire Little League baseball team with room to spare.
A smaller V8 would have left money for an automatic and upgraded interior.
Still, a great study in “Less is More!”
A fantastic find. Somewhere I have a Standard Catalog or some such that presents the take rate for manual transmissions during some model years. If memory serves, the take rate for manual transmissions in a Mercury (which would also include the 4 speeds in the higher trimmed cars) was 2% or less…I’m guessing less. This would be a fun car to drive.
To me, the value proposition of this Mercury would be to option a Ford as close to identical as possible, then see what the difference in outlay would be.
The Monterey name is another great example of name debasement coming from Detroit.
I’d be interested in that stat! It’s amazing they still bothered tooling up a manual version of these cars. Either they were really dedicated to giving the minority of customers a choice or they felt it served their marketing well to have a base transmission that (almost) nobody wanted.
Looking into the details of these cars, I was surprised that the base equipment level on the medium priced brands was not much different than the low priced brands, and options cost about the same. Styling, size, and engine were the main thing you got for the extra money. A Ford Custom 500 V8 (one up from the basest model and the most equivalent to Monterey) was $2573, or $209 difference.
The Monterey did suffer name debasement, but it was more of a roller coaster than most other examples. After being demoted, it got promoted again before being re-demoted.
Often not thought of today but cars like this with a manual transmission were favored by many people who towed. The take rate might not have been high but it didn’t hurt their image to be seen towing horse trailers or campers or other expensive pursuits.
Fantastic find and writeup! Some of the little details here are amazing, such as the dash plate covering the radio. At no time in the last 60 years did anyone think “Hmm… I should add a radio to the Mercury…”
I wonder if this car was a loss leader example to get customers into the showroom with a low price, or if someone custom-ordered the car to these exact specifications?
And regarding Rankin Motors, looks like it was a Mercury franchise (as well as Ford). I think the dealership persisted as a Ford-Mercury dealer, though under different names, until the early 2000s.
Nice job finding that! I looked, but my internet sleuthing abilities are not so impressive.
From the time these came out when I was a little kid, I always found the 65 Mercury’s styling to be clumsy, especially in the detailing. The bumper and taillight treatment probably looked great in the drawings, but looked like a Cuban fabrication in real life. The too-tall marker lights in front looked off in relationship to everything else around them. And the dash was the crudest design since the 1958 Studebaker.
If you thought the 65 Galaxie wasn’t angular enough, well here was your car. Mercury fixed the kludgy details on the 66, and got the Cadillac-style taillights right in 67-68.
But all that said, I love this car. A low-mile, original strippo is a rare and beautiful thing in an old car. And what better color than this old man beige. I am trying to remember the newest full-sized car I can remember in person that came with a column-shifted 3 speed – the best I can do is a 68 Chevy sedan driven by a guy I worked with at a job in the late 1970’s. But the newest that was not in the Ford-Chevy-Plymouth class? That’s a good question.
I’ve mentioned it a few times here before but when I was a car jockey at a Ford dealer in 1971, I had to drive a service customer’s car up to the rooftop parking lot. It was a ’69 LTD with the optional 390 V8, three on the tree and…manual steering. I couldn’t believe it. I assumed the ps pump was out because it was such a bear to get up the ramp and into the lot. I popped the hood to check…no ps pump.
The customer was a tough and grizzled old timer. He ordered it just the way he wanted it. And I’m sure the same applies to the guy who ordered this Merc.
Another great survivor .
I’d rock this as is .
It’s far too big for me but what style and presence .
-Nate
The strangest up-market stripper in my experience was the 1964 Oldsmobile 98 that my great uncle, Frank, custom ordered with no power windows, no radio, and NO air conditioning even though he lived in Houston, Texas.
Uncle Frank owned a furniture store that was only a few blocks from his house so it is understandable that he might eschew the radio but I cannot imagine traveling any distance around the gulf coast with no AC. Even my mother’s 1963 Chevy II had an underdash unit that was rudimentary but effective.
The depression was in full force when Uncle Frank was a young man and he obviously did not grow up with air conditioning in Louisiana so perhaps he was “acclimated.” He was also very frugal but might have been cognizant of the image his mode of transportation parked in front of his store projected as a successful but prudent businessman (as long as no one looked through the window and noticed the blank off plate where the radio would have been).
Chevrolet: doesn’t indicate success – Cadillac: too ostentatious
Interesting story about the 98. You wouldn’t think someone buying that fancy of a car would want it so stripped, but your uncle’s example makes sense for where he came from. It’s amazing to me that even on Old’s flagship model, there was no standard radio.
I do remember people (my grandparents age) who grew up poor in the depression could be quite miserly when they were older. Even if they had a decent amount of money later in life, they could be selectively frugal in surprising areas.
The older I get the more I want light up a smoke (I quit 40 years ago) and drive a car like this, what the hell is wrong with me.
Now that you mention it, this car makes me want to crack the vent window and light up too! I’m right behind you, quit almost 35 years ago.
This car strikes me as being most appropriately driven while smoking a cigar. Though that would require a fair amount of coordination while rowing the gears in this car.
Gosh, this is a tough one to call…
I can’t imagine a dealer of mid-priced cars would order this for the lot. Not even as a bait-and-switch car. They weren’t in the business of selling cheap cars.
I also can’t imagine someone who would order this. You’re not going to impress the neighbors by driving a “fancy car” with dog dish hubcaps – it would be a dead giveaway in 1965.
And if Rankin Motors was actually a F-L-M dealer, as Eric703 suggests, that would make them even less inclined to order a stripped Mercury for the lot.
I just can’t make sense of this.
The guy who ordered it grew up in the wilds of Texas driving jalopy Model Ts on the ranch as a kid and Model As as a young man. And he eventually fell for a ’39 Mercury when he could afford his first new car. Hot rodded it some. Became a Mercury man. Bought a ’49 after the war. Warmed up the flathead with triple carbs. Drove it forever, but finally sprung for a new ’65, ordered just the way he liked his cars: very basic. No frills. Just the thing to bomb down the endless rural roads of Texas. But he got lung cancer from his 2 pack a day habit and had to put it away in the garage after just two years.
He couldn’t give a flying f*ck about impressing his neighbors.
Size was status in the 1960s….“it’s better to have the cheapest house on a nice block than the nicest house on a cheap block.” The same logic applies with cars,
I beg to differ; it didn’t work that way with cars. The perfect example of that is the Corvair Monza. It was so popular precisely because one could buy a well-trimmed bucket-seat Monza for about the same price as a low-end big Chevy Biscayne. Guess which one had more eye-appeal and image value?
And then came the Mustang. Which had more appeal, image and cool factor: a Mustang or a stripper big Mercury? The answer is of course totally obvious.
I suspect you’re a bit younger than me and weren’t around in the ’60s. I can assure you that this stripper Merc had essentially zero prestige value. Everyone saw it for what it was: a cheap Ford with a different skin, owned by the old skinflint down the street. Zero prestige value. Mercury as a brand had very low prestige value in the early-mid ’60s anyway, and this stripper had none. An LTD had a hundred times more.
This was ordered by that gruff old guy who grew up driving Model T jalopies and such on the back roads of Texas and became a Mercury guy along the way. probably had a hotted up ’39 or ’49 in the past. And he had zero interest in trying to impress anyone.
You’re right, I was born after the 60’s, so I wasn’t around to experience attitudes of the time. Wouldn’t attitudes have a lot to do with people’s age? I would think that what people your age at the time considered prestigious was not necessarily the same thing that the type of older people who bought Mercury sedans considered upscale. The appeal, image and cool factor of smaller sporty cars was probably lost on many of them.
Wasn’t the rule of thumb from the 20’s through at least the 60’s that the more expensive the car, the larger it was? Therefore, a larger car implied a certain amount of status. My impression is that rule started being eroded by upscale imports and by the quest of U.S. makers to appeal to baby boomer car buyers (like with the cars you mentioned).
I do understand your point that any individual who’s choices were driven by status was not buying a base Monterey with poverty caps. I imagine there were other reasons for buying a larger car like that, like having a roomy interior for family trips or the towing considerations mentioned by others.
The Dodge 383 in 65 was 270hp, it was dropped from 305 in 65 due to a compression drop.
Thanks, I don’t know where the 250 figure came from. I’ve corrected it, as well as the Pontiac which I also somehow got wrong.
We had a few Colony Park Mercurys in the late 60s, and early 70s in the family. These were loaded models, so as a teenager I quite liked them. I can’t imagine going for the bare-bones model. Buying lightly used cars for cash has been my mantra. But didn’t folks have auto loans back then? Would adding a few niceties to the monthly payments have made such a significant difference?
I am intrigued by what Hard Boiled Eggs commented above re. there being a preference back then for cars with manual transmissions and non-powered steering as towing vehicles. I’m not able to easily find any online “facts” to back that contention up, but it is definitely something that I have heard.
What I do have is a car (the 1976 Volvo) that is configured just like this – manual and non-power steering – and that absolutely was done because the original owner was devoted to using the car for regularly towing some sort of trailer (a camper, I think). Of course, my car has an enormous factory tow hitch and towing/trailer mirrors…something that this Mercury is missing. But maybe this car was ordered up by the dealer for such a buyer, and instead found its way into the hands of the crusty old Texan skinflint that Paul describes.
I have heard that the thinking was that the armstrong steering gave “better road feel” and the manual transmission allowed for more precision in gear choice (useful going up and down grades?), avoided overheating automatic transmissions, and provided every available bit of horsepower when towing heavy loads. All of which may be more belief than fact…but I could see folks believing all of that and buying what would be a stripper car to fill those demands.
Oh, and the same case would be made for deleting the air conditioning (power sapping)…although a car like this without air conditioning may have been somewhat common anyway in 1965.
I do have to say that that’s one heck of a big car to be trying to park at the grocery store (even in 1965 even in Texas) without power steering.
Great find, Jon.
Back in highschool 74-76 I had a 65 Mercury Comet 404. AM radio was the only option. 3 in the tree.
In 2018 I ordered a new Jeep Wrangler Sport for retirement. The only options were Automatic, A/C, tinted glass. I had the dealer install running boards prior to delivery. I read the JL Jeep forums and everyone seems to have 60k loaded up Rubicons. 50 years from now people may wonder who ordered a stripped down Wrangler.
Cool! That Jeep sounds nice and appropriate for a Jeep. I’m amazed at how much people spend on Jeeps these days. I high school in the 80’s, my parents had an 84 CJ. 4 cylinder, manual, base steel wheels. Only option was a hardtop, as far as I know. I would have preferred it with a 6 cylinder, but I still think a real Jeeps have sticks.