The original Mercury logo, used from 1939 to 1940.
Editor’s Note: As TheDetroitBureau.com reported, this week, Ford’s long-struggling Mercury brand officially ceased to exist as the New Year rolled in. But whether it should have been sent to the automotive rust heap is a matter of debate. While most folks were happy to see it go, TheDetroitBureau.com’s resident historian – and contrarian — Mike Davis weighs in with an opposing viewpoint.
According to the latest definitions, a contrarian argues a counter-intuitive position against the conventional wisdom. (Note: the word contrarian does not even appear in my vintage 1967 American College Dictionary, much less the one I used as an undergraduate 15 years earlier. Nor does Microsoft’s spell-check like it.)
Ford Motor Company, after starving its traditional “medium-price” Mercury nameplate for years, finally pulled the plug with production of the last Mercury Grand Marquis at the St. Thomas, Ontario, assembly plant earlier this week. Assembly of badge-engineered Mercury Milan, Mercury Mariner and Mercury Mountaineer ended last year. Even earlier, the company killed off Mercury Cougar and a decade ago never invested in a Mercury version of Focus.
Meager production will continue at St. Thomas for the Panther-family Lincoln Town Car and police- and taxi-only Ford Crown Victoria until the end of August–or sooner. These are the last of America’s traditional V-8 rear-wheel-drive sedans on separate frames, the kind that most American cars once were (the exceptions being Sixes rather than Eights).
There are really two issues in Mercury’s extinction, the Mercury brand and the St. Thomas cars.
First, it is inappropriate to cite Mercury’s starved sales in 2010 as a reason for its demise, suggesting it was a market failure. Last year’s numbers do not take into consideration the overall substantially “down” automotive market as well as the impact on sales of fewer Mercury models offered, meager-to-no marketing support and the negative psychological impact of buying a make that was rumored by media for years to become an orphan. Citing declining terminal sales as a justification for extinction could apply to Oldsmobile and Pontiac as well.
In late 1938 as a 1939 model, Mercury was introduced as a lower-medium-price brand, to fit under the upper-medium Lincoln-Zephyr. Ford Motor Company’s major competitors GM and Chrysler both offered multiple “medium price” nameplates. In recent decades, though, this “middle” marketplace has largely disappeared under the multiplicity of car sizes offered by any one dealership.
Ironically, the middle market also has migrated upwards to import brands such as Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Lexus. In a sense, this upwards—and outwards–migration likewise supports the marketing notion that buyers like to show off their prosperity and taste—but it has wandered away from American products in cars, cameras, TVs and cellphones. Only American computers have withstood the trend, and they are largely manufactured in Asia.
Even in the internal fight within Ford Motor Company over Mercury brand extinction, it was argued that Mercury didn’t matter any more because it only appealed to old folks (you know, the ones who no longer have college expenses and mortgages). Probably the argument that carried the field, though, was CEO Alan Mulally’s push for the “One Ford” concept, which in a youthful management had neither understanding of, nor strong support for, Mercury inside the company.
What One-Ford bodes for Lincoln could be subject of yet another column—I think it will be very hard for Lincoln-only dealers to stay in business without either a volume Mercury to sell nor a unique luxury vehicle once the Town Car is gone.
So, the end of Mercury evolved from a culmination of other factors in the marketplace and within Ford Motor Company. Little known, however, was the external factor of the billion-dollar-plus estimated cost to Ford of totally re-engineering the St. Thomas cars to meet a new safety standard.
For 2012, there is a revised Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard–in my opinion of marginal value to American motorists—for compliance with an off-center impact test at high speed into a fixed vertical obstruction. It is not that such crashes do not occur and that they can be fatal to even belted occupants if the speed is high enough. But I challenge the statistical basis for the standard as applied to the type of car and the cost of compliance that really killed off the St. Thomas Panther car family.
The internal cost to Ford of complying with this regulation to support production at one assembly plant could not be justified in a weak and uncertain marketplace and in the face of other more pressing demands for funding. A Toyota or another home-government-supported auto company could have afforded it—but not a Detroit maker.
In other words, I argue that the demise of the St. Thomas cars is a direct result of the unanticipated results of regulatory overkill. Once in place a Federal regulatory bureaucracy, and its Greek chorus of anti-business activist supporters inside the Beltway, never is able to declare the battle won and disband itself. It always must find new dragons to slay, regardless of their size, real threat and the lateral damage of evermore regulations.
I’ll stop here because you may suspect where I’m heading.