Friday, May 28, 2010

Our Shrinking American Heritage

Had you asked us, we couldn't have told you if the Mercury brand still existed. Not that we know anything about automobiles (or anything the hell else) beyond what we see/hear on the screen or in the cyberspace. Central to our point, as we've not seen a tee vee advert for a Mercury w/in living memory.
"Mercury is a brand that has lost its meaning in the American automotive marketplace and it isn't worth trying to change that," Edmunds.com CEO Jeremy Anwyl said in a statement.
Probably not a good idea to re-imagine the Cougar right now, even if they remembered it.
Mercury, a mid-range brand designed to sit between the basic Ford brand and the luxury Lincoln brand, has been flailing for a while. Mercury's sales peaked in 1978 at more than 580,000 vehicles and have been declining ever since (2009 sales were only 92,000 vehicles).
To the best of this reporter's recall, the only thing Mercury ever did of any interest was the breezeway roof.
Watch the scarf, Isadora!

2 comments:

Glennis said...

We had Mercuries....a nice little compact station wagon Lynx in the 90s and a Sable wagon in the early 2000s. It made us feel SOOOOOO much more classy than if we'd had Escorts or Tauruses (Taurii?}

Larry Harmon said...

My old man had a 1965 Merc with the breezeway window. It was way cool, it was operated by a toggle switch on the dashboard. Boy, I wish I had that car now.
P.