(first posted 7/3/2015) The original Cougar epitomized the personal luxury-sports coupe. We’ve documented how the Cougar lost its way in the later 70s, becoming a full line of mega-medium-sized cars, including even a station wagon. By 1983, the Cougar found its way again, as a coupe-only, wearing new aero-duds. But for two years only, 1981 and 1982, the Cougar was available also as a two door sedan. And you’re looking at one.
My definition of a two-door sedan is that it has to use the same roof line and C-Pillar as the four door sedan, whereas a genuine coupe has a roof that is either shortened, lower, or just differently shaped than the corresponding sedan’s. The downsized Fox-body Cougar arrived in 1980 only as a XR-7 “coupe” wearing a Donald Trump-worthy “wig”. Since there was no four door, it’s “coupe” enough for me.
And the 1980 XR-7 sat on an extended wheelbase Fox-body, with 108.4″ between the hubs.
But in 1981, the Cougar line suddenly swelled again, becoming the de-facto replacement for the departed Monarch. And even Mercury calls them “sedans”, 2-Door and 4-Door. And if these sedans look a bit stubby, its because they’re sitting on the Fairmont/Zephyr’s 105. 5″ wheelbase.
The XR-7 isn’t called a “coupe” in the brochure, but there’s no doubt that it is a legitimate one, with its C-Pillar moved forward (along with more rake), fulfilling the most classical definition of a coupe.
So what prompted a two-door sedan Cougar? If it was taking over from the Monarch, that illustrious car had a coupe, but no two-door sedan.
But the Zephyr did, which in my opinion was a better-looking car than the Cougar sedans. But the Zephyr was still being built, right through 1982. Oh well; Mercury’s product planners (always) knew best.
On the inside, it would be hard to readily distinguish this from a higher-trim Zephyr.
That applies particularly so to the rear seat, which has a rather un-inviting solid plastic molding for its whole side. Not very Cougar-like.
If that back seat was a bit depressing, the engine line-up for the 1981 Cougar was even more so. Standard engine was the 88 hp 2.3 L “Pinto” four; optional was the (also) 88 hp 200 cubic inch Falcon six. If one really had to have V8 power, the only one on tap was the sad 255 V8 that made all of 115 hp. The 130 hp 302 was reserved for the XR-7. These were the low point for Ford, the company that once touted itself as the “Total Performance” company.
There’s a chance this is actually a 1982, since I can’t readily tell the difference, but things got only slightly better: the 200 six became standard, but managed to lose one horsepower, dropping to 87. Oh well….
To bad that’s not a Sable next to it, but these two show a pretty clear evolution of Ford design over a 15 year or so period. Given the choice between them; we’ll, let’s just say that somehow the idea of telling folks you drive a “Cougar two-door sedan” is perversely appealing.
Kinda like it, kinda don’t. I honestly don’t understand why Mercury existed at all for most of its life- it seemed a distraction from Ford, and its resources could have been better spent at Lincoln.
A FoMoCo Almost Deadly Sin?
Mercury existed so that Lincoln dealers would have another line of cars to sell, and so FoMoCo could have more outlets to sell cars, without having too many Ford dealers near each other.
Mercury made sense when Detroit owned 90%+ of the American market. Mercury stopped making sense in about the late ’90s.
Why Ford (Mercury) chose to market these as Cougars instead of Monarchs, I’ll never understand. If Monarchs had a bad reputation by that time, why would you be better off de-basing/de-valuing the Cougar nameplate?
As for differences between these Cougar’s instrument panels and that of the same year Zephyr….didn’t ALL Cougars have the same instrument panel with “square” instruments versus the Zephyr’s round instruments?
BTW, I lobbied my Dad hard to buy a Zephyr and he really liked the V8 4 door he wound up with. But I was so embarrassed by it’s poor assembly quality. In particular, carpets that were (apparently?) just laid on the floor and seemed to be a size too small….something that afflicted every 80s Fox-body car I rode in.
I wondered the same question. Do they think then the Cougar monicker have more appeal then Monarch? (And they didn’t learned from the 1st-time when the Montego was rechristened as the Cougar) This site had posted a vintage scan (from Motor Trend or Car & Driver) of a spyshot of a 1981 Mercury who was still referred as the Monarch.
http://www.lincolnversailles.com/Monarch/1981%20Mercury%20Monarch.htm
My father had a 76 Monarch, and as near as I could ever figure, Monarch had no image at all. Whenever I told someone that my dad had a Monarch, I got a blank stare until I added “like a Granada.”
I used to have the same problem with my Mercury Capris. If I was talking to a person who wasn’t real up to date on the Mercury model line up, it was just easier to describe it “like a Mustang”.
Why Ford (Mercury) chose to market these as Cougars instead of Monarchs, I’ll never understand. If Monarchs had a bad reputation by that time, why would you be better off de-basing/de-valuing the Cougar nameplate?
I always figured they were copying Oldsmobile, who spread around as much Cutlass love as they could until brand dilution finally killed the company. But due to far fewer resources, Mercury had no choice but to phone it in with this generation. The Cutlass kicked ass in the 80s, Olds sold a ton of them, until suburbia fell in love with the SUV.
The last real ray of hope for Mercury was the ’83-’88 aero Cougar, and the ’89-’97 “supercoupe” that followed. It was always an obvious twin to the T-Bird, which as usual stole the show, but I think the big M came up with a nicely differentiated design with a simple roofline change and slightly softer package for a more mature audience. Of course the T-Bird spanked it in sales, but that was the plan. The Cougar picked up incremental sales of people who wouldn’t have bought a T-Bird or were on the fence. But as we’ve discussed many times here, the big, relatively affordable coupe market dried up by the mid 90s as automotive tastes and needs changed.
The 302 was never offered in these Fox-Cougars. It was 255 only in ’81, then dropped. The 232 V6 was tops in ’82. Despite it’s feebleness, I still would have ordered it. It’s still a V8, and was preferable to all the other power units in these.
As for the car itself, oy vey, what were they thinking?
The Monarch 2 door at least had pleasant lines. I think they felt that they obliged to differentiate it from the 2-door Zephyr, which, as noted above, actually looks good.
You’re right about the 302, though it was optional in the Fairmont and Zephyr for their first two model years and was also available in the first gen Granada and Monarch right through their last model year in 1980.
My Encyclopedia and the brochure both show the 302 as optional.
But only in the XR-7. The regular Cougar V8 was 255 only.
Yep. According to my parts catalog (I’m at work right now at a Lincoln dealer 🙂 ) 3.3 and later the 3.8 were the only engines available in the non-XR7 Cougar in ’82.
Note that in 1982 the 255 V8 was the top V8 option on the XR-7 and T-Bird as the 302 was dropped thta year from the roster for 49 state cars. And it was downgraded to only 111 HP. That was the bad news. The somewhat good news was that it was paired solely with the 4 speed AOD transmission and better 3.08 rear gears.
Aha! I didn’t read the fine print.
My 81 xr7 has a 302 in it with only 88k original miles
From what I understand the Final Drive ratio with the 255 was incredibly long.
Made for a nice interstate cruiser but – ahem – leisurely acceleration.
2.47. Yikes!
That’s long, but the longest final drive ratio may be the 77-79 Cadillac C-body, 2:28. Optional (California and high altitude) 2:73 and 3:08.
The title for worst final drive ratio goes to GM for it’s 2.14 rear gears on the 1984-1987 3 speed 307 Cutlass Supremes and the 1980 301 Grand Prix with 3 speed transmission.
And I thought 2.24 in the post-1980 V8 Dodge Diplomat/Plymouth Gran Fury/Chrysler Fifth Ave was bad.
Correction: The Cougar was available as a 2 door sedan from 1977-1979 also. It shared the roof line and rear end treatment ad the four doors those same years. It was much like the LTD II’s in that the only difference on the rear was the taillight trim.
It’s lacking the framed door glass that really defines a two door sedan. It’s a hardtop coupe with fixed rear window 🙂
You probably straightened me out on this before, but I’m lost on some of these distinctions, including framed door glass = sedan. Is a 4-door sedan with frameless door glass NOT a sedan? Just asking.
A long time ago sedan vs coupe had something to do with rear legroom… or someone once BSed me along that line…
Well, in dorky sort of way that’s in the right direction. Sedan = practical; designed with expectation that all seats are suited to regular use. Coupe = personal/sporty, expectation is that it will be used by driver and front seat passenger with little consideration for regular rear seat use. Hence a shorter roofline (maybe fastback), smaller rear side windows, shorter wheelbase, etc.
But…when I first started to tune into this stuff as a kid, I got confused about some of this, for example why the Beetle was considered a sedan and not a coupe. I’m perhaps still confused. Or maybe the distinction is just confusing by its nature.
I’ve always sort of subscribed to the view, as Paul pointed out in the article, that a 2-door that has the same roofline as the correspondent 4-door plus framed door glass is a 2-door sedan. Like the featured Cougar here, or for another good example, an 80’s or early 90’s 2-door Accord. Same roofline, B-pillar, longer doors. A 2-door with a unique roofline is a coupe. A 4-door with frameless glass and no b-pillar is a 4-door hardtop, which I consider different than a sedan.
A 2-door with fixed B-pillar and the same roofline as the sedan, but frameless glass extending past the door join? Hmm. Semi-hardtop coupe maybe? Granted it’s a small genre (these cougars, the equivalent LTD II…, some 70’s LTDs, some variants of the 70-series Corolla…)
Yep. And a rather nicely proportioned coupe at that, too. Extravagant, lurid perhaps, but I always appreciated the ’77-’79 Cougars for what they were: the last gasp of 50s American car design. Huge, flashy, and exuberant. They sold a lot of these too, at least the full-trim XR-7 2-doors. Wagons, sedans, and plain jane coupes, not so much. I just wish they had made that rear window roll down. Seems like a mean, bean counter cost saving trick. Same thing for the Mark V.
I wonder why Mercury didn’t tried a similar strategy with the Cougar and Montego (and later with the Monarch) then Dodge once used in the 1970s, all intermediate 2-door models was called Charger while the 4-door and wagons was Coronet?
The 80-82 Cougar XR-7 was essentially a Thunderbird with a slightly tweaked front end. The 81-82 Cougar 4-door sedan/2-door sedan/wagon was little more than a rebadged Granada.
It’s a 1981 base model. In 1982, they dropped the base model, including the plain metal exterior molding and the interior gained the GS door panels, among other things.
This car is pretty similar to my former 1981 Granada. I actually prefer the styling of these to the Fairmont and Zephyr. V8s were rarely ordered in these in 1981 and only the Thunderbird/XR-7 got the AOD.
If it was my money back then, a loaded 4 door Cougar LS or Thunderbird Heritage/ XR-7 LS. Any Fox bodied car is going to be durable, comfortable, and unique. Thumbs up on this article.
“Donald Trump worthy-wig” – great analogy. Besides the stubby wheelbase, the Cougar 2-door sedans actually looked more attractive than the bizarrely proportioned XR-7.
Is it odd that I find these somewhat appealing?
No, I do too 😀 !
My first impression?
“Is that the interior of an upscale car, or a basic Ford? A lot of shiny plastic and some odd colour matches”
Turd brown suits this car really well.
My BIL had a 4-dr Cougar sedan, an ’81 model with the 255 V8 when it was about 10 years old. It held up pretty well, was the same brown turd colour but had a really nice beigy cloth interior with very comfy seats (I believe it had a split bench in front with fold-down armrests). This is the car he bought after he totaled his ’81 Fairmont 4-dr sedan in a stupid accident. So it was interesting to compare the two. In general, the Cougars of this vintage were a heavier, plusher extension of the Fairmont/Zephr platform, although this one is a base model and isn’t far off the old Fairmont sedan, which was pretty much a stripper.
I remember the 255 V8 not having much grunt, and straining a bit to move the car. It rode and handled pretty much like the Fairmont too, safe and reassuring but dull. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these 2-drs in the flesh, they must not have been big sellers. It looks nicer than the overdecorated XR-7 coupe.
Ok… Station Wagon Cougar… we never stop learning stuff!!!!
I guess this is what to do when a badge series absolutely must be kept alive, glue it onto anything no matter how irrelevant to the nameplates history it might be and hope the punters are fooled.
Worked for Oldsmobile. (Until it didn’t.) Who knew there were so many ways to slice n’ dice that once proud Cutlass name.
LeBaron too, for Chrysler
I typically like Fox-based cars but in this case the Zephyr coupe is so much better looking you have to ask why they bothered.
Still that example looks clean and rust-free, would make a neat project if it had a V8.
Another one that just makes me scratch my head and ask “what the hell were they thinking while they hatched this one up”.
I like it, but I tend to like oddball cars anyway 🙂 . I’d drop an EFI 5.0L, a T5, and an 8.8 with 3.73 gears in it and leave the rest alone. Sleeper!
That’s what I think every time I see a clean early box-shape Fox.
I’d also add the Quadra-shock rear end while I was at it or that extra power will be largely useless.
If you want a sleeper, you want a 2door fairmont with a modern 4.6 4cam coyote motor out of an SVT Cobra Mustang.
The 2-door Fairmont was so generically designed they could have just called it “Car” and no one would have blinked an eye. It was the equivalent of ‘no-name’ canned foods that were probably just as good as their fancy DelMonte competitors but allowed people to save by not paying for all the marketing hype/branding/packaging. But hey, those were sober, resource constrained times and they couldn’t keep building ’79 T-Birds and Cougars forever.
yep
Its basically a Rambler…in spirit.
The early Fairmont Two Door was the best of the Box-Foxes. Another good play is to find an I4 Manual example and go the Turbo Lima Block route. They’re lightweight cars so anything over 250 HP is going to make them fly.
This particular brown Cougar is growing on me. The vinyl top in body color isn’t so bad (much better than the XR7 two-tone with the faux-vented window covering) and the chrome is nicely done – I like the way the body side molding matches the height and width of the bumpers, giving it a wrap-around effect.
The Fairmont/Zephyr is still the best of the breed though – the big windows and crisp lines are very appealing, especially now. I don’t get the hate. [shrugs]
I don’t like vinyl tops. I would go for a 2door cougar without the vinyl though. I actually like the rear side window on the cougar 2door better than the 2door fairmont but I like the lights and bumpers on the fairmont better.
I did not fully appreciate until just now the extent to which the Fox platform had become Ford’s K car before there was a K. A dozen variants, many of which were just trim tweaks.
The subject car never sat well with me. It was like Ford took all the ideas in my mind to make the Fairmont / Zephyr look something besides cheap. This is a sort of clean look, but it would have to have been introduced in 1971 to have been leading edge in any way. Ford got a huge break when the X car blew up in GM’s face about the time these hit the road. It bought them enough time to start getting some modern and / or improved product in their showrooms.
That black XR-7 coupe sans any vinyl top almost actually looks good in side profile. I do not recall seeing that look on the road almost at all.
Ford got a huge break when the X car blew up in GM’s face about the time these hit the road. It bought them enough time to start getting some modern and / or improved product in their showrooms.
Great point, I never thought of that angle. People probably thought, “Well, I need a dependable mid-size car. Wheels are falling Citations, if you brake in the wet you get a nasty lesson in low-friction physics, and they just seem generally crappy. Looks like I’m going with good old conventional Ford.”
That black XR-7 coupe sans any vinyl top almost actually looks good in side profile. I do not recall seeing that look on the road almost at all.
Something has always bugged me about the ’80-’82 T-Bird/Cougar. It’s that side view. There’s too much length behind the door relative to the front of the door and front axle. It would have looked better if the proportions were reversed. I realise they had to share the Fox platform, and they were trying to make this generation more space efficient, as people realized it was silly to buy a 215″ long car that had no rear seat legroom. But still… I remain obsessed with dash-to-axle ratios.
Yeah, the Coupe model in the brochure without the vinyl top looks strangely OK – I’ve never seen one in photos or in person. I always assumed the gaudy overly thick Landau top with the slots in it was the standard roof on those (the design of it looks way more Chrysler than Ford).
I really like 60s/70s vinyl tops when they are totally flush with the sheetmetal and installed on a clean design, just to create a nice color contrast. Say, a ’77 B-body. But those super stuffed padded ones that started proliferating in the 1980s just look terrible.
I really like the hood ornament on these, but the rest of the car just has the weirdest proportions, even for the time period. Ford styling from 1978-1983 was just sad. They just couldn’t do the “sheer look” like GM and Chrysler, at all. Instead of the graceful, elegantly sloping designs from Chevy and Cadillac, these and the bigger LTD/Marquis just look like three cardboard refrigerator boxes pasted together to form a car.
The brochure should have been titled “Mercury Officially Hits Bottom!”
There is some strange attraction I have always had to these. Except for the miserable powerplants, miserable state of engine electronics, and miserable features like the turn signal stalk to blow the horn. A huge fail, these were almost invisible in the 80s, even from new.
The horn stalk. Ugh! It was the answer to a question no one was asking. When you need that emergency blast from the horn are you going to remember that Ford wants you to do it differently?
I’m trying to imagine the circumstances that birthed that idea and the subsequent design meetings that took place. How many times along the way did someone ask, “You want to do what now?” and how long was it before the question was no longer asked and everyone else just said, “Okay, fine, whatever.”
Fasten your seat belt, Paolo. Most every time I put up this same rant, a few people rush to point out that some European cars did it this way long before Ford did. Which I guess is…supposed to somehow…make it okeh or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had that on my Cortina. Drove it 25 years and never got used to the horn-on-a-stick.
I always thought the 81-82 Granada was somewhat better looking than the Cougar. You never saw that many of the Cougars around but the Granada sold reasonably well.
I factory-ordered an 82 Granada GL 2-door sedan (see pic below when new). The only engine options on the 82 Granada were the 3.3 inline six or the new 3.8 V6. Mine had the trusty 3.3 with automatic, in part a reaction to the immediately preceding years of fuel crisis. A mistake as it was very underpowered. I ordered the rare bucket seat and floor shift options – I never saw another car so equipped. I also ordered the “heavy duty” suspension!
These were very reliable cars. As far as I know mine might still be on the road. The woman who bought the car from me decades ago died last year. The Granada was sold shortly before her death and it was still running – a 32 year old two-owner car!
Still have the window sticker:
The automatic transmission was optional? That must have been a sales gimmick so they could advertise a loss leader base price that no one ever actually paid. I imagine 99.99% of these had an automatic.
It’s very cool you still have the window sticker.
It’s difficult to imagine, but the standard power plant for this car was the 2.3 Lima four cylinder and the standard transmission was a four-speed manual – floor shift. I’m sure you are right that few were ordered with the manual, and the same goes for the 2.3. I know of one of the latter because I inherited an 81 Granada with the 2.3 and 1,000 miles on the ODO in 81 and I traded it in for this factory-ordered 82. The 2.3 made the 3.3 seem fast. To say nothing of the fact that it was noisy and rough. The 3.3 inline six was smooth and quiet – but not enough engine for this car.
Adjusted for inflation that’s about $26,800 in 2015 dollars. It is mind-blowing when you think about how much car you can get for that kind of money today. New or just a couple years old. As much as technology can be painful to deal with, it has vastly improved our automobiles.
For 26K plus you can land Ford’s very own Fusion in SE trim with Sync and the sport wheel, leather wheel option package and 1.5 turbo with 184 hp and up to 37 MPG. Yes we have advanced in some ways but it has cost today’s cars much character and interest.
I remember liking the related ’81 Granadas when they came out, and thinking how rounded the frontal styling looked. Friends of our family, the Coopers, had a black Granada coupe that I really liked when I was around 6 or 7.
Several thoughts:
* While not an unattractive car, this base, brown Cougar should have been called something else (to echo other comments on this post);
* I have never noticed before now just how *wack* the proportions of the same-year XR7 looked, before today. The black one (to echo Dave B. and Max P.) is the only XR7 that looks acceptable. The short doors look almost like those of a 4-door with the rear doors welded shut. And the trunk looks almost as long as the hood. It needs about 6-inches of rear overhang grafted onto the hood and central door-section;
* Did anybody who went to the local Lincoln-Mercury dealer and saw this Cougar next to a Zephyr completely ignore the similar dimensions and think it was on a different platform? That must have been a not-insubstantial capital investment for the Cougar sedan’s different sheetmetal (from the Zephyr).
What an excellent find.
While not an unattractive car, this base, brown Cougar should have been called something else.
Montego would have worked perfectly.
I would totally buy this car just so I can transfer the plates to another vehicle. That is if I had another vehicle.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Cougar two door sedan of this particular vintage in person before, but certainly I’ve come across a handful of Granadas in this body style. I assume because of the Ford variant being produced as a two door sedan it was easy enough to throw some Mercury badges and treatments on it and get a few more units out there.
I haven’t seen one of these in ages… like the Fairmont and Zephyr… they are very rare today.
The Mercury division of Ford should be a required study in business school. It should have been more successful but due to penny pinching and mismanagement it died on the vine.
I used to extremely dislike this generation of Cougar. A gingerbreaded-up version of the Zephyr, and the debasement of a proud name. Nowadays? Rarity reduces contempt, though they’re still far from my favorites.
And Mercury is indeed a study in mismanagement. Even in the rare occasion when they had something good and unique in their later years, they couldn’t sell it. (Like the Marauder, or to a lesser extent, the final “sport coupe” Cougar.)
Even though I consider this car a Ford Deadly Sin for many reasons including using the Cougar name attached to a tarted up Fairmont with Fairmont engines (3.8 V6 aside), softer suspension settings and in most examples worse performance than it’s platform mate due to increased weight, I still find them intriguing to this day along with it’s personal luxury brothers the XR-7 and T-Bird. The fact that most were equipped with the sluggish 200 six says a lot and it would sure seem like these cars should have been seen more with the 255 V8 and 3.8 V6 a year later with there upmarket intentions. My grandparent’s neighbor had a 1981 base 4 door sedan in Granada guise with the 200 six and it made her a decent around town car. The interior was rather sloppily put together and the exterior trim didn’t line up quite right but it was reasonably reliable otherwise until the tell tail rust killed it.
I dust-off this subject by mentionning this guy who swapped a 460ci V8 under the hood of a 1981 Cougar, it’s an XR7 rebuilt as a nod to the 1964 Fairlane Thunderbolt. With some tweaks here and there, some surviving Fox-body 1981-82 Granada/Cougar could be a good sleeper.
http://www.streetlegaltv.com/features/car-features/readers-wheels-glenns-great-white-1981-mercury-xr7-tribute-build/
I had one (bought used) as a teen in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. Totally underpowered. Used as much oil as gas too. It was transportation, but the Omega I had previous to it was way better.
I always the liked the 1980–82 Mercury Cougar XR7 coupes.
I really thought they were nice looking cars. Same with the 1980-82 Thunderbirds.
That shot of the left front quarter illustrates everything wrong with Ford during this era; to me at least Everything was squares and rectangles; not a curve to be found. I assume this was part of the cost cutting and decontenting of the era (because it’s cheaper to form panels without curves)?
Whatever the reason, these cars look they were designed to be intentionally boring and forgettable. And that went for Chrysler and GM too; even the C4 vette looked like a wood wedge.
I have come to believe that the only decent car from 1981 was the Lincoln Town Car.
Y’wanna make a bet?
What is that green panel – artificial turf?
Currently watching “Mindhunter” (Netflix).
All these Fairmonts, Granadas, Monarchs, and Zephers appearing on the screen. Open parking lots for rental car locations with a shack as the office.
Three part paper (gold, canary, and green) for the rental agreements.
Sooooo retro!!
To me these Cougars embodied everything that was wrong with the 70’s grafted it onto a fox body as a tribute to the old Renascence era with the post modern era giving the world one last chance to see 500 years of styles and history blended into one auto. I salute the ambitiousness of the project. From that prospective I can somewhat appreciate the artisans rendition.
That is not a Cougar…end of discussion.
I agree, not a Cougar, everything after 1970 is crap. The aero “Cats”, lets slap a formal roof line on the Aero Bird. Has any other model spanned such a wide variety of vehicles? Muscle car, personal luxury coupe, station wagon, 4 dr sedan, compact FWD coupe. Mercury sure tried to milk the Cat for all it was worth.
Obviously Mercury didn’t realize that you cannot milk a cat. Just try…
Different taillights, different rear quarter panels, different taillights, different front valance, different grille, different headlight buckets… I mean you might not like the styling but other than the shared doors hood and front fenders the differentiation with the aero ones isn’t exactly substandard from the 1967 effort over a Mustang coupe. And in the scheme of things the Cougar’s styling changed just like how the Camaro’s styling changed from one generation to the next, but for whatever reason Ford products seem to invoke many passions that dismiss any deviation from the initial formula, Thunderbirds, Mustangs, Cougars, all inferior name bearers if they don’t resemble 55, 65 and 67 respectively… Yet ironically they’re also among the only American cars that actually kept the names going in the lauded Camcord formula. Just can’t please everyone.
The real Cougar, that is the true coupe versions and certainly all the ones christened with an XR7 badge, were faithful personal luxury coupes from 1967 to 1997. Yes, they went from “compact”(loosely defined given the dimensions of the 69-73 cars) to intermediate in 1974 and back to roughly the same size as the originals in 80 in spite of their midsize classification in the post-downsized times.
That said, the feature car isn’t a Cougar to me either, it’s a cynical marketing exercise to try to add appeal to the car formerly known as Monarch, just as the “base” 77s did with the cars formerly known as Montegos, or the current exercise of using the Mustang name to add appeal to a E-SUV that people assure me is completely different and I’m a luddite curmudgeon for drawing a parallel to 🙂
This was a very good car.
I’m not old enough to covet an old Mustang-based Cougar, but old enough to remember them as luxury cars during the 1970s – which was Mercury salad days, btw.
The Brougham Age was fresh and popular, and Cougar was what Ford/Mercury offered to to entice buyers out of their Cutlass obsessions. It worked quite well actually. Cougar had a good chuck of the Brougham Personal Luxury car market.
When downsizing happened, Brougham cars weren’t able to keep up their sales dominance. Yet – automakers still believed that the magic Brougham formula could keep sales going for a while longer. All through the 1980s we see auto makers dressing up their vehicles with Brougham goodness.
What this car did well was offer big car comfort in a smaller package. The Fox body Cougar was more modern, handled better, more fuel efficient, and kept buyers wanting big car comfort buying a Mercury. This Cougar is the perfect size.
Is it a Cougar? Yes. The Cougar brand had been around decades, and it was not just a Mustang-based coupe. It was a luxury vehicle for far longer than it ever was a sporty coupe.
Is it a good car? Yes. I’d take one like this without a hesitation. It has the right power train, ride, size and comfort to be a very nice car.
I would agree to some extent when it comes to the XR7 coupe model. I’d take a 80-82 XR7 over any of the huge 74-79 Predecessors any day, and I’d hold onto it too if it has the 302 and the exceptionally rare Recaro interior and no Landau top.
However there isn’t any of that luxury found standard in the sedan based models that are just badge engineered Granadas, the base model sedans without options are a penalty box.
I aquired 1 of these with the 4.2 v8 no vinal top.xr7’s. Its got the plush valour 60-40 split bench seats. Fold down armrests. 4 lug 15″ wheels and cold ac. The weird part to me is the overhang on the body to the wheels at the top of the wheelhouse. Kinda triangular side profile if you will. Runs and drives fine with 81k mils on it. Bygone era that im glad to call gone and say goodby too.