Mercury Goes the Way of the DoDo

Damn, this was a fine brand of automobile for many years. I put it to you the blog reader, that if they still made cars like the one in the picture below but with all the modern updates of today's automobiles, they'd have no problems selling cars, even during a depression. Mercury joins Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Plymouth, and Saturn on the scrapheap.

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Ford to End Production of Its Mercury Line
By MICHELINE MAYNARD

DETROIT — Edsel Ford conceived the Mercury brand in the 1930s as a way to fill the gap between basic Fords and luxury Lincolns. Now, that gap will again go unfilled.

Ford Motor announced Wednesday that it would discontinue selling Mercury models this fall, ending a 71-year-old brand that once stood for innovation and speed but that became a “me, too” division.

Mark Fields, the president of Ford’s Americas region, said Ford directors approved the step on Wednesday. He said the company would focus its resources on its core Ford division as well as Lincoln.

“As we close this storied chapter on Mercury, we are opening a very exciting chapter, not only on Ford but on accelerating Lincoln,” Mr. Fields said.

Mercury came to life during the Depression, when Ford was striving to keep pace with General Motors, which had passed Ford to become the country’s top-selling automaker. At its cultural height in the 1950s, Mercury became known for innovative cars like the Turnpike Cruiser, whose features included a power rear window, the “seat-o-matic” adjusting seat, and the “Merc-o-matic” automatic transmission.

James Dean, playing a rebellious teenager, drove a black Mercury coupe in the 1955 film “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Mercury joins a sizable list of venerable Detroit brands that have disappeared in recent years. In 2009, General Motors said that it would eliminate Saturn, Hummer and Pontiac as it streamlined after its bankruptcy filing, and it did away with Oldsmobile in 2004. Saab was also discontinued as a G.M. brand, though it will have new owners.

Chrysler dropped the Plymouth brand in 2001, and the Chrysler brand itself is considered by some analysts to be in doubt, now that the company is under the management control of the Italian automaker Fiat.

“This decade is for sure going to be remembered in the auto industry as a decade of consolidation, a renewed focus on profitability instead of going blindly after market share, and shedding dead weight in terms of dealerships,” said Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and insights for TrueCar, a new-car pricing Web site.

Before Mercury, the two ends of Ford’s spectrum were its inexpensive cars and trucks, which the founder, Henry Ford, encouraged buyers to buy in the color black, and the sleek Lincoln models, which were known for their streamlined appearance.

But G.M. picked up customers by offering “a car for every purse and purpose,” a phrase coined by its president, Alfred P. Sloan Jr.

So, Mr. Ford’s son Edsel commissioned the development of the Mercury Eight, which went on sale in 1939. The car had a 95-horsepower V-8 engine that was 10 horsepower stronger than the Ford V-8, but it cost less than a Lincoln.

Sales were strong until World War II interrupted production. They prospered again in 1949, when the first all-new postwar Mercury models reached showrooms.

By the 1960s, Mercury had become a place for slightly different and generally more expensive versions of the cars sold by the Ford division.

“Mercury products have been nothing more than modestly restyled Fords for decades, and that’s not how you build or maintain a brand,” said Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Edmunds.com, a Web site that offers car-buying advice.

Mercurys of the 1960s included the Comet, a stretched version of the Ford Falcon, and the Cougar, originally a muscle-car variation on the Mustang but which was three inches longer and boasted a gutsy front grill that some likened to an electric shaver.

In the 1970s, because of the energy crisis and new fuel economy standards, Mercury made smaller cars, including the Capri, initially built in Europe. When Ford developed the Taurus sedan in the 1980s, it gave Mercury a version called the Sable.

More recently, Mercury’s lineup has included the Milan, its best-selling model, which is based on the Ford Fusion, as well as the Grand Marquis, a rear-wheel drive car that has been sold by Ford in some fashion since the 1970s.

Mercury sales peaked at 580,000 in 1978, also a year of record hourly employment for the Detroit auto companies. In 2009, Ford sold fewer than 93,000 Mercury models.

So far in 2010, Mercury sales are 41,680, up 11.6 percent from last year, but they make up only 0.8 percent of the American car market.

Mr. Fields said Ford has no stand-alone Mercury dealers, which should simplify shutting the division. He declined to say how much closing Mercury would cost Ford. Mercury models are sold by 1,700 dealers, which also have a franchise with Ford, Lincoln or another brand.

Bob Tasca Jr., a Rhode Island dealer who heads Ford’s national Lincoln-Mercury dealer council, said dealers had pressed Ford for years to tell them the fate of the division and finally learned this year that a decision was at hand.

Although expected, Mr. Tasca said, the step was fraught with emotion. For dealers, he said, “there’s going to be some cases where a lot of them are going to make it and prosper and some are going to go out of business.”