Last Days for Mercury?

I hate to say “I told you so”, but in January of 2006 I asked then Ford CEO Bill Ford Jr. why they had not canned the Lincoln and Mercury brands in order to focus squarely on Ford. Bill responded by claiming that the three brands worked very well together, and seemed pretty dismissive of the idea to streamline the brand portfolio. (Read the Q&A on Time.com)

Shortly thereafter, Ford Jr. was replaced by Alan Mulally as the company CEO, and today the newswires are reporting that Mercury is on the chopping block. This comes just a couple months after Ford unloaded Landrover and Jaguar to Indian automaker Tata.

According to the Cleveland Leader, industry analyst Aaron Bragman of Global Insight believes “Mercury has one more product cycle left in it, and then will most certainly be retired as a brand.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that Mercury sales have dropped off dramatically. “After regularly selling half a million vehicles a year during the mid-1980s, Mercury sold only 168,000 cars and sport utility vehicles last year. Its U.S. sales are down 23% this year — the biggest drop for any brand except Chrysler and Hummer.”

From a FordMuscle viewpoint, Mercury really hasn’t produced anything of enthusiast interest since the 2003-2004 Mercury Maurader (pictured). Before that you had to go back to the early ’70s to find any significant muscle. Since then, the brand has carried an awkward, semi-luxury, position between Ford and Lincoln. Most of the models offered were just nameplate upgrades of a Ford model (e.g. Ford Fusion, Mercury Milan and Lincoln Zephyr), the reasonable deduction was that Ford was the bottom-end “econo” product to Mercury and Lincoln. This, in my opinion, made no sense at a time when Ford was struggling to revive its brand image and perceived quality, among other things.

-Chirag

Read the entire story, and tell us what you think.