I really feel that the current merc lineup was far to weak. I do not think it offered the middle ground between lincoln and ford as it once did. Maybe ford just came to far in quailty style to fast for merc to keep up.

 

Agreed, man. The fact is, Mercury sales peaked in 1978 and have dropped away since then.

19 - freakin' - 78. As in 32 years ago.

That's a rather long trend when for nearly half the life of the marque, your sales numbers have been declining.

 

Mercury still sold more cars in May than Lincoln, although it was said to be mostly family/employee sales...

 

Well, Mercury is much cheaper than Lincoln.

 

Unlike Mercury, Ford actually seems to be making a push to make Lincolns relevant (as Ford's luxury brand). I would've still rather seen them do that with Mercury though. Mercury died because Ford put forth no effort and decided to abandon it to wither and die a slow death. Lincolns are nice but I would really like to seem them do away with the baleen whale front ends (demonstrated nicely on that MKR).

 

I did this chop a few years ago... and even updated it with the newer Lincoln bow wave nose but I can't find it on my laptop.... I may have lost it on my old laptop that crashed or have it achieved on disc somewhere.

Anyway I kinda dig the shovel nose variation on the Mustang body. In my idea of a throwback to the Mark IV, I replaced the triangular Mustang quarter window with the Mark IV's oval porthole. The back ended up with a set of MKZ/Zephyr styled taillamps that wrapped around and a similar designed decklid. I resisted temptation to resurrect the spare tire bulge.

It's a love it or hate it chop concept and not to be taken too seriously. In an ideal world I would certainly do way more to make it distinct from a Mustang and not have it look like a rebadge/retrim job.

Back in the day I felt Lincoln was more exclusive and distinctive by have just a couple of model offerings. Now they are trying to match model for model with many Ford offerings with unique sheetmetal styling or retrimmed rebadges. The way it looks now, the MKZ and MKX are the blantant rebadge retrimmed Fords while different tophats are being applied to newer models like the MKS and MKT.

Sad to see Mercury leave but they needed to be much more than retrimmed Fords that were only intended to give L-M dealers sales volume.