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Junkyard Gem: 1995 Mercury Tracer Trio

With the rise of Radwood, cars with exaggerated characteristics associated with the 1980s and 1990s are cool again. That means some combination of pastel and/or neon colors, squiggly squeezed-from-toothpaste-tube graphics, nonfunctional decklid spoilers, giant TURBO badging, and kicky youth-centric nomenclature are required if you want your wheels to be considered in compliance with the sacred tenets of Radism. I do my best to find rad machinery while crawling around in car graveyards, and since I came of driving age in 1982 I know a bit about the subject. Today's rare Junkyard Gem shows us the Mercury Division's belated attempt to sell fun cars to rad-leaning youngsters: a Tracer Trio, found in a Denver yard a few weeks back. The Trio package added 310 bucks to the cost of the $11,280 base Tracer sedan (that's about $575 on a $20,925 car in 2022 dollars), and it got the hip-and-trendy young buyer a leather-wrapped steering wheel, seven-spoke wheels, a decklid spoiler and these rad fender badges. I'm going to say that the much louder graphics and candy-cane-colored displacement badges on the Pontiac Sunbird W25 out-radded the Tracer Trio by a mile, but then Pontiac generally out-radded everyone in those days. Even Plymouth got into the act with such radness as the Breeze Expresso and Sundance Duster (we'll overlook the anti-rad Horizon Miser here). Perhaps tellingly, Mercury, Pontiac and Plymouth all got the "Old Yeller" treatment not long after the Rad Era ended. The Tracer name always went on Mercuries built on Mazda platforms, starting with the Australia-built, Ford Laser-based 1987-1989 cars and then continuing with Mexico-assembled, Ford Escort-based 1991-1996 cars. That generation of Escort/Tracer was mechanical twins with the Mazda Protege, itself the bridge between the 323 and the Mazda3. Some Tracers got the a 1.8-liter Mazda engine that was related to the Miata's engine, but this one has the pure-Detroit CVH 1.9. You're looking at 88 horsepower right here; the Mazda 1.8 offered 127 horses. At least the original buyer of this car got the base five-speed manual transmission instead of forking over $815 extra (about $1,510 today) for the four-speed slushbox. As a 29-year-old slacker living in San Francisco's Mission District and driving a hooptie '65 Chevy Impala sedan at the time, I would have taken the manual transmission without the Trio package, had I been forced to buy a new Tracer.

Ford finds flex-fuel engine design plays big role in emissions output

How bad is ethanol for your engine? There's been a lot of debate on this issue as the US considers upping the biofuel content in the national gasoline supply from 10 percent (E10) to 15 percent (E15). The ethanol industry and some scientists say higher ethanol blends show no "meaningful differences" in new engines while the oil industry says ethanol creates health risks. Researchers working at the Ford Research and Innovation Center decided to take a closer look at how a wide range of gas-ethanol blends - E0, E10, E20, E30, E40, E55 and E80 - affected the emissions coming out of a flex-fuel 2006 Mercury Grand Marquis. To see the full report, printed in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, requires payment, but there is an abstract and Green Car Congress has some more details. The gist is that, "with increasing ethanol content in the fuel, the tailpipe emissions of ethanol, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, methane, and ammonia increased." At least NOx and NMHC emissions decreased. The researchers say that the effects are due to the fuel and "are expected for all FFVs," but that the way that a manufacturer calibrates the engine will affect NOx, THC, and NMOG emissions. It's this last bit that's important, since the researchers found, "Higher ethanol content in gasoline affects several fundamental fuel properties that can impact emissions. ... These changes can have positive or negative effects that can depend on engine design, hardware, and control strategy. In addition to direct emissions impacts, higher ethanol content fuel can also provide more efficient combustion and overall engine operation under part-load conditions and under knock-limited higher-load conditions." So, as we head towards more ethanol in our fuel supply (maybe), manufacturers are going to need to learn how to burn it most efficiently.

Junkyard Gem: 2007 Mercury Mariner Hybrid

Once hybrid vehicles from Honda and Toyota proved to work well in the real world of American streets during the early 2000s, other U.S.-market manufacturers climbed aboard the gasoline-electric bandwagon. Ford introduced the Escape Hybrid for the 2005 model year and sales proved quite strong; its Mercury-badged sibling, the Mariner Hybrid, appeared the following year. The Mariner Hybrid never induced many vehicle shoppers to sign on the line which is dotted, despite gasoline prices going absolutely ape in 2008, though it remained available all the way through the Mercury brand's 2010 demise. Here's one of those rare trucks, found in a Denver-area yard last month. The Escape/Mariner Hybrids got amazing fuel economy for tall, truck-shaped machines, though the serious penny-pinchers with long commutes skipped anything built in the 21st century and began driving up the prices of the once-scorned Geo Metro XFi, gas-sipping champion of the previous decade. The Mercury brand was on the ropes by this time, with not much to distinguish the once-distinctive Mercury machines from their near-identical Ford counterparts. The 1999-2002 Cougar was the last Mercury sold here with no twin brothers over in the Ford showrooms. I do see the occasional Escape Hybrid in places like this, though such gas-saving small SUVs tend to retain their value well enough that it takes a crash to retire one. This Mariner Hybrid hit something hard and either flipped on its side or scraped a guardrail for some distance. The airbags deployed and, presumably, spared the occupants from serious injury. That's the good news. The bad news is that fixing this kind of damage to a 13-year-old vehicle made by a defunct brand just isn't worth it to insurance companies, hybrid-electric powertrain or not. We can assume that the battery pack lives on in another Escape/Mariner. Navigation, Bluetooth, and other features that were considered pretty slick in 2007. This truck was in pretty good shape until the very end. Jill Wagner proved that you can bury a Mercury emblem in volcanic soil and it will grow into a brand-new Mariner Hybrid. That's how science works! You can go to the same field and tap on a Mercury emblem, if you want to get a regular gasoline Mariner. Featured Gallery Junked 2007 Mercury Mariner Hybrid View 20 Photos Auto News Green Mercury Automotive History Crossover SUV Hybrid mercury mariner mercury mariner hybrid Junkyard Gems