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Junkyard Gem: 1977 Mercury Bobcat

Cultural memory of the Ford Pinto, 38 years after the last new ones were sold, boils down to one thing today: the notorious "exploding Pinto" stories of the late 1970s. Yes, many Pinto jokes were told, the resale value of Pintos crashed, and few paid any attention to the fact that most of the cars sold with the fuel tank between the rear axle and the bumper — that is, just about every Detroit car made during the era — suffered from the same weakness. The Mercury version of the Pinto was badged as the Bobcat, but nobody told Bobcat jokes. Here's a '77 Mercury Bobcat 3-Door in vivid Medium Jade paint, spotted in a Denver self-service yard. The Pinto with glass rear hatch was known as the Pinto Runabout in 1977, while Mercury called this car the " Bobcat 3-door with Glass Third Door." When a car sits for years or decades in High Plains Colorado, rodents tend to nest in it. This Bobcat's air cleaner made a cozy home for our Hantavirus-carrying friends. The 1970s were the last gasp for eye-searingly green vinyl car interiors. Since the Bobcat was a luxed-up Pinto, the door panels have shinier trim than what you'd have had in a proletariat-grade Pinto. Pinto/Bobcat transmission choices boiled down to two: a four-speed manual or a three-speed automatic. Unusually for a Malaise Era Mercury, this one has the manual. Most Pintos and Bobcats came with four-cylinder engines, ranging from the 1.6-liter pushrod Kent to the 2.3-liter engine that lived on for many post-Pinto years in Ford Rangers. This car has the 2.3, rated at 89 horsepower, but the same 2.8-liter Cologne V6 that powered the Capri was available as an option in the Bobcat. That engine made a mighty 93 horsepower. These cars were not too miserable to drive by econobox standards of their time, at least when they had three pedals. You'd blow the doors off a '77 Corolla with a 4-speed Bobcat in a drag race, though the Corolla got better fuel economy. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Gives you hundreds of pounds more car than most small imports and includes standard self-adjusting rear brakes! Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Featured Gallery Junked 1979 Mercury Bobcat View 15 Photos Auto News Mercury Automotive History ford pinto bobcat

Icon and Stealth EV are building an electric Derelict Mercury

Icon, a company known for its high-quality restomod vehicles, is building another Derelict, this one a 1949 Mercury coupe. While the fact Icon is building another one of its sleeper hot rods with patina isn't the most shocking, what's under the hood is. The company has teamed up with Stealth EV to turn this latest Derelict into an electric car. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. The car was shown in the above Twitter post with video. The exterior is just what you'd expect from an Icon Derelict. It's solid but with a weathered finish. And even as the guy from Stealth EV approaches the car, it looks like it has a V8 under the hood. But as he explains, there's actually the two motor controllers and half of a Tesla battery pack under there. It's just that they've all been given some classy looking metal casings and mounted to look like a V8. Apparently the motors themselves are in the transmission tunnel. The Stealth EV rep says it uses a pair of AM Racing motors. Depending on which motor controllers the companies are using, those motors could produce as much as 700 horsepower. Power will go to the rear wheels and no transmission will be used, making it direct drive. It will have a limited-slip differential, and the whole car sits on an Art Morrison chassis with independent suspension. This actually isn't the first electric Icon, nor the first developed with Stealth EV. Before this, the companies created a totally awesome electric Volkswagen Thing. That little truck made much less power at 180 horses, but it was also a way smaller and lighter vehicle. Related Video:

Junkyard Gem: 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis LS

We've all been seeing the instantly familiar Ford Crown Victoria P71 Police Interceptor on North American roads for what seems like forever, though in fact the very first of the aerodynamic Crown Vics didn't appear until a mere 31 years ago. Yes, after more than a decade of boxy LTD Crown Victorias, Dearborn took the late-1970s-vintage Panther platform and added a brand-new, Taurus-influenced smooth body and modern overhead-cam V8 engine, giving us the 1992 Ford Crown Victoria. The rule was, since 1939, that (nearly) every Ford model needed a corresponding Mercury, and so the Mercury Division applied different grille and taillights and the rejuvenated Grand Marquis was born. Here's one of the first of those cars to be built, now residing in a Denver-area self-service boneyard. The Marquis name goes respectably far back, to the late 1960s and a Mercurized version of the Ford LTD hardtop. The Grand Marquis began life as the name for an interior trim package on the 1974 Marquis Brougham (also LTD-based), eventually becoming a model in its own right for the 1979 model year. Today's Junkyard Gem came off the Ontario assembly line in March 1991, making one of the very first examples built. For 1992 (and through 2011), the Grand Marquis was a Crown Victoria with slightly enhanced bragging rights. This one has the top-grade LS trim, with an MSRP of $20,644 (that's about $44,370 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars). The corresponding Ford-badged model (built on the same assembly line by the same workers) would have been the Crown Victoria LX, which actually cost a bit more: $20,987 ($44,910 now). The very cheapest civilian 1992 Crown Vic cost just $19,563 ($42,045 today). There weren't any powertrain differences between the Crown Victoria and Grand Marquis in 1992. The only engine available was this Modular 4.6 SOHC V8, rated at either 190 (single exhaust) or 210 (dual exhaust) horsepower. The transmission was a four-speed automatic with overdrive. How many miles are on this one? Can't say! Based on the worn-out interior, I'm going to guess 221,719 miles passed beneath this car's wheels during its 32-plus years on the road. I've seen some very high-mile Police Interceptors, of course, including one with 412,013 miles, but Ford didn't go to six-digit odometers in the Grand Marquis until a bit deeper into the 1990s. Thanks to flawed speech-to-text applications on smartphones, the Grand Marquis is known as the "Grandma Keith" to many of us today.