Thursday, June 3, 2010 |
10:36 - Mercury falling
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/business/03mercury.html?hp
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Well that's about damn time:
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.
Mercury was nothing but a badge and some grillework almost ever since the start. The only recent Mercury that wasn't a rebadged Ford was the Villager minivan... and that was a rebadged Nissan Quest.
So on the one hand it's not like they're losing anything by doing this (the "women's branding" thing they tried in the 2000s never really caught on), and it's a long overdue end to an ill-conceived marque—the fewer badge twins on the car market, the better, as far as I'm concerned. But on the other hand it was exactly what it is today even throughout the automotive Golden Age: people loved their Cougars, even though they were just gussied-up Mustangs.
So this may be a solution to nothing but my own tastes (and some factory tooling and dealership complexity). But I'm still glad to see it. Especially since now it looks like Lincoln has a much freer hand and charter to become something special and unique, the worthy competitor to Cadillac that it was supposed to be in the longlongago.
(Which isn't to say either is even in the same league as BMW or Mercedes or even Lexus. But maybe now that things are changing, even that conclusion might no longer be foregone.)
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