2001 Mercury Mountaineer on 2040-cars

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What do you do with a fake Bugatti Veyron for $60k?

Replica cars are a challenging labor of love because builders spend countless hours recreating a vehicle that people immediately compare to the real thing. Perhaps, the person behind this Mercury Cougar-based Bugatti Veyron should look for another way to pass that time. The coupe is currently for sale on eBay Motors for $59,900. The builder deserves some credit because the fiberglass body looks acceptable in the photos from farther away. The car might even fool a few people from a distance. However, the devil is in the details, and the closer you look, the worse this gets. The side intakes are especially rough. The red interior is atrocious. It's essentially the Cougar's cabin but in an eye-searing shade accented with lots of fake carbon fiber. The seller's eBay Motors ad really tries to market the look, though. "You slide in to [sic] this extremely comfortable leather interior and you feel like your bank account just quadrupled in size," the listing says. Don't expect to win any top speed titles in this Veyron replica, either. Rather than a mid-mounted quad-turbo W16, a 3.0-liter V6 from a Mercury Sable sits at the front. Thanks to an upgraded intake and exhaust, the seller claims, "It doesn't sound like your grandmas [sic] Sable." We wish the seller the best of luck, but the asking price of nearly $60,000 is probably too optimistic. We would still think twice about buying it even after taking a zero off that figure, but at least this thing is fun to look at. Related Video:

Junkyard Gem: 1981 Mercury Cougar XR-7

The story of the Mercury Cougar involves more plot twists and unexpected digressions than that of just about any other Detroit car, with successive Cougar generations based on the Ford Mustang (1967-1973), the Ford Torino and/or Thunderbird (1974-1979), various Fox Fords including the Thunderbird (1980-1988), the MN12 Thunderbird/Lincoln Mark VIII (1989-1997), and the Ford Mondeo (1999-2002). There were wagon and sedan Cougars for brief periods, just to confuse everybody, and the rakish XR-7 Cougars sometimes lived on different platforms from their ordinary non-XR-7 counterparts. I think the Late Malaise Era Fox XR-7s are among the most interesting of the bunch, so I was quite excited to spot this tan-over-gold '81 in a Denver yard. I tried to count the number of screaming-cat badges on and in this car and gave up once I hit a dozen. The steering wheel, door panels, C pillars, center console, and — of course — the hood ornament all boast snarling felines. Earlier Cougars had emblems showing full side views of stalking catamounts, but the Cougar logo for the 1980s showed just the head. This car got the optional center console, which I hear is quite a rarity. You had to pay $174 extra (that's around $513 in 2020 dollars) for an AM/FM/cassette audio system in the '81 Cougar, but at least the air conditioning was standard equipment. Believe it or not, thieves used to steal these radios. Kumpf Lincoln-Mercury still exists in Englewood (as Landmark Lincoln), and the yard that now houses this car can be found just 15 miles up Broadway on the north side of Denver.  The padded landau roof hasn't fared so well beneath the fierce Colorado sun, but overall this car seems very solid. Sadly, only the Mustangs and (once in a long while) Fairmonts get much love from the Fox Ford crowd these days. Three Mercury "wire wheel" hubcaps and one from a Lincoln. The base engine in the 1981 XR-7 was the "Thriftmaster" 200-cubic-inch (3.3-liter) straight-six, but very few XR-7 buyers would have refrained from checking the box for one of the two optional Windsor V8s. I can't tell if we're looking at the 255-cubic-inch (4.2-liter) version or the 302-cubic-inch (5.0-liter) one here, but real-world drivers might not have noticed the difference between the 120-horse 255 and the 130-horse 302, anyway. The non-XR-7 Fox Cougars had five-speed manual transmissions as base equipment (which nobody wanted), but all 1981 XR-7s had automatics.

Report: Last Mercury for retail business built on Sunday

Ford is already well into winding down its Mercury line, and the autoamker has announced that the very last of the soon-to-be dead brand's products built for retail sales was manufactured on Sunday, October 3. The final Mercury Mariner rolled off of the assembly line at the company's Kansas City facility, putting an end to a brand with over 70 years of history behind it.
Even after the Mariner heads off into the automotive sunset, Ford says that it will continue to manufacture a handful of Mercury models for fleet and government service for a while longer, though mum's the word on how long we can expect that practice to continue.
Interestingly enough, according to USA Today, most incentives on Mercury vehicles have all but dried up, even as the brand's August production increased by 120 percent compared to July's figures. Instead of cash on the hood, some areas are offering no-cost maintenance or similar programs. Even so, Mercury has continued to out-sell Lincoln right to the end - besting Ford's luxury arm's sales by nine percent in August.