WC Man

I have an 07 Grand Marquis. Yesterday afternoon, I got in to go to the store. The ABS and parking brake light both remain on, the digital part of the dash and the HVAC do not work, and the steering feels heavier than it should. It went away after driving the car for about 10 minutes, was gone this morning, then it came back again. Calling the shop next week, just wondering if anyone knows what it is.

More power without sacrificing efficiency. I've seen aftermaket conversions that look awesome. Would love to see for offer a "family" package with quad buckets and a bench in back, or 6 buckets. The raised roof offers wonderful opportunities for entertainment options. In reality, the interior only needs minimal upgrades as real parents prefer durable over style. I would offer another cross-shop option for minivan/MPV shoppers. Its different enough to not cut into C-max or Edge sales.

They can't build it. Tough and simple, few features, more options, not "packages" that load crap on it I never use. Little computer control in the engine (told you they couldn't build it) so home mechanics can work on it. Simple V-8 motor. Manual Transmission available. Durable, easy to work on, interior. Limit hidden screws and latches. Lots of aftermarket goodies. Solid axles, simple suspension setup. Assume it is going to sell to people more interested in off-road-ability than highway ride. Do not market to the crowd that buys the Edge, we have one of those. Two doors, seats five only, high stance. This has worked for Jeep for almost 100 years. We have station wagon replacements, nothing is being offered to people who do not want those. They will never make this vehicle. My setup calls for a vehicle that combines 60's simplicity combined with 2010 reliability. This is not a vehicle that can have 10000 electronic nannies on it. It requires a driver that quits texting and focuses at least part of their attention on DRIVING the vehicle. Its also a vehicle that doesn't require a million dollars in computers to diagnosis. Like I said, they can't and won't build this vehicle. You can get it in India or South America, but not here.

One day, when the bulk of these cars have been ruined by aftermarket tuners, and they are collected as the last great American road car, this will be seen as a stupid move by Ford.

Look at its competition friends. The Cobalt would've been a competitive compact 10 years ago, and Dodge thought an inefficient nearly-crossover was the ticket to competing in a field that is still cost sensitive. I do not hold out hope for the Cruze, GM seems incapable of competing in this segment. Chrysler could compete, depending on the Fiat content of the coming small sedan and execution. But Ford seems poised to move into the Honda-Toyota field if the new Focus has the brass tacks to take 'em on.

I was thinking the opposite. Make the Flex a bit bigger. Make it completely competitive with minivans from Toyota, Honda, and Chrysler. The Explorer can chase the fad crossovers, while the Flex can carve out a niche as the upmarket non-minivan.

Let me help you out. Take the edge, add some outback-style lower body effects, stretch it a bit, add a third row seat, and there you go! :happy feet:

Toyota needs all the help they can get. The xD is basically a new vehicle and it can't outsell a Chrysler that was introduced in the last century! Where did this come from? Why aren't the small Jeeps on it? Isn't the Versa classified as a compact car?

I personally like all the attention to "Providing Mercury customers with continued parts and service". That's mighty white of 'em, of course, outside of the grille, logos, and possibly wheels EVERY PART ON A MERCURY IS THE SAME AS A FREAKING FORD!!!!!!!!! They HAVE to produce 90% of the parts because they are on the SAME Ford models. I wish I wish I wish I could believe all this crap. But it sounds all the world to me like they are planning on slapping Lincoln grilles on Mercury products already in the pipeline. I would love to see a Lexus fighter, or even a Acura fighter, hell, a Buick fighter might even be nice. But I just have a hard time believing it before I see it. In my area, they closed the LM lot and did not move the cars to the Ford lot, so its easy to see how Mercury sales were flat, they weren't even available. Boy talk about badge engineering! Infinitis aren't even that reliable. Have fun.

Stupid comparo meant to hype the Hyundai, who the entire auto-rag core seem to be having a collective orgasm about. Lexus is a luxury car, Hyundai claims to be a luxury car, Buick is a dinosaur from the last decade waiting to become extinct, and the Taurus is not, nor has it ever claimed to be, a luxury car. Its a working man's car that should be compared to similar models. I don't put any faith in any of those magazines these days. They want more horsepower or better handling as long as the car they like has it. C & D consistantly chose the Mazda Protege/3 over far more powerful small cars due to handling, even though almost nobody purchases a small car and takes it to the track to work out the suspension. Motor Trend once said the M5 was a better sports car than the Corvette because it was more comfortable. Most people here could give you a huge list of reasons that a Ford is better than any other car in its class. When you pre-determine the winner, its strengths become the most important features a car can have.

Eco-boost is basic progress. My '96 Villager has a 151 hp V-6 that was considered very competitive in its day. My wife's '09 Patriot has a 173 hp I4. Today, you can hardly consider a V-6 viable if it doesn't make north of 200 hp. The popular 302 and 351 truck engines only made 250 and 290 hp in thier respective most powerful forms. Truth is, for some 90% of truck owners, the EB will more than satisfy their needs. But in trucking circles, "mines bigger" bragging rights reign supreme to the point that people who never haul anything more than a bag of garbage pay for ridiculously powerful trucks. That's fine if you want to pay for it, I drive a car that no longer requires a V-8 motor, but Ford cannot ignore CAFE. Maybe all of these truck guys should spend more time writing their congressmen instead of griping about Ford offering what the almighty government demands. And for the vast majority of owners, they will never do enough to truly tax the motor.

I guess we can all agree that the current Lincoln plan, whatever the heck it is, is not working. Still, salvaging Mercury will not help Lincoln. If Lincoln is to survive as a luxury marquee, it, not Mercury, must compete with C-class, 3-series, TSX, & IS. Personally, I don't see the brand surviving as it doesn't seem to have any kind of market appeal. Maybe Ford could cancel it and re-introduce the brand at a later date if the market warrants it. How many independent Lincoln Mercury Lots are left anyhow? They disappeared here several years ago.

Alas poor Mercury...I drove ye well. What ridiculous arguments? That some of us prefer traditional comfort to underwhelming FWD platforms? Let's ditch Mustang too! Oh well, I guess losing a few hundred thousand buyers won't mean much to Ford. BTW, far more greyhairs drive Toyotas and Buicks than Mercuries. I don't think you are allowed to test drive the Avalon unless you can produce an AARP card! I expected Mercury to disappear with the MGM. There is no place for mid-level brands anymore. GM will only make it so far with Buick/GMC, probably long enough to consolidate all of their lots to Cadillac/Buick/GMC or Chevrolet/Buick/GMC before they axe the brands. Nothing but MGM had any market appeal from Mercury. Sure, guys like me might shop only because we prefer the Waterfall grille to the Gillete razor, but they were basically selling Fords. Ah well, we'll always have the past together. At three cars, Mercury is my current "most owned" brand. Kinda hurts my chances with Ford though, I can't bring myself to love the razorblades. I guess I may look elsewhere for my next vehicle. How? Those are luxury cars. Better to build Lincolns at that size.

I guess you build a less efficient minivan and you get less sales. Flex is a minivan pretending, at best, to be a station wagon. It a neat looking vehicle, but Honda and Mazda have already proved car doors do not work in the minivan world. Flex is too boxified to be confused for a CUV, and Explorer is about to yank that rug out from under it. I think you push the other way. Make the vehicle taller with more interior room. Go the transit connect route and offer a business oriented model alongside the consumer model. Consider the possibility of optional sliding doors.

Hey now! Those people paid a $1000 premium for that high quality electrical gremlin Oops, I mean whatever the they claimed was wrong with a floor mat that somehow caused those cars to go out of control. Those were super-deluxe quality floormats to, not those cheap non-accelerator jamming one found in Fords .

Hardly understand the "nail in the coffin part". How do you drive a nail in the coffin of a vehicle that is already scheduled to end production??? In fact, the man in the article says clearly they are trying to find a replacement by the time the Panther goes out of production. If the Panther was so bad, they could have approve any number of vehicles to replace it long ago.

And she may live to regret it yet.

No no wait! Festiva! Bobcat anyone! That would be my overall choicw as well. Comet sounds sportier than Tracer. Tracer doesn't have negative stigma though. So the Mercury hooker is out I take it? :happy feet: Just checking, I've had many arguments with people who think a 454 SS Chevelle handeled like a go-kart. I checked today to make sure. When the 440 Hemi was rated on net horsepower, before smog equipment, it made 330 hp. The 4.6 L (281 cu in.) makes 315, with emmission equipment that would totally choke that hemi.

I remind everyone who is compaining about the "'80's" name that Civic is a 70's name and Corolla is a 60's name, and they are the best selling compacts in the country. Tracer is a good name. As opposed to those crisp handling cars of the 50's, 60's, & 70's? Oh but they had power right? Nothing like 200 hp from a 400 cubic inch V-8 dragging a 6000 lb. car around! Look, I'm not saying they didn't build good cars in those decades, but the ones you see carefully preserved today were the rare best of breed, not the cars most people drove. And the racecars were mostly modified. The Honda Accord V-6 can take a lot of "muscle cars" in factory form. For every Ford Boss Mustang, there were a couple hundred crappy Ramblers put on the road. For every Bel Air hardtop, chevy sold 20 sedans. If we looked at the cars of the '80 based only on cars like the 5.0 Mustang, IROC-Z, and Buick GSX, we would imagine a world where every working Joe was drag racing from every stoplight. The reason so many people remember cars from those decades fondl is they never actually had to drive them. The Escort was a good car for its time, the Mazda GLC was excellent. Yes, I still shudder imagining what it was like to drive anything small from GM during the decade, but Ford and Chrysler actually had some decent products out there.

Jeep gets 7400 lbs. out of the Grand Cherokee, which has been unibody since its inception. I expect Ford to match that. Otherwise, this vehicle has little advantage over the Flex. Ford's being smart here, gas prices have always been cyclical in the US. Invairiably, Amaericans move to small cars in droves when gas goes up, then, as the economy adjusts, they move back to large vehicles. The government can do very little to stop this. When they made large cars unprofitable in an attempt to move people to small cars, the SUV boom was born. As I just said, Jeep has been building a UB SUV for 2 decades. Unless this is going to be another minivan in desguise. They are doing nothing. No offense to Explorer owners (I have one in my family) but its basically become a Country Squire without the wood siding anyhow. Calling it an SUV is already a bit of a stretch.

'73 Ford Maverick Grabber, Orange w/ Black Decals preferred '72-'73 Mercury Montego GT '72 Ford Club Wagon These were the cars from my childhood. It doesn't matter whether anyone else thought they were cool. When I was a little kid, my cousins all had Pintos and Volkswagens, or big 4-door sedans. Our Maverick and Mercury (I didn't know it had been a montego until I was an adult. We always simply called it the "Mercury") had cool styling, racing stripes, and V-8 motors. The Club Wagon was a retired church van that we bought when I was about 10 and kept forever. Something about the flat nose, spartan nature of the beast (begging for customization) and my unnatural attraction to vans just made me love it. I will always hold a soft spot for the '88 Topaz (my first mercury), but I would never call it "cool". Among cars I haven't owned: 64-65 Mercury Comet '58 Mercury Monterey (If your going to drive an over-chromed, over-styled '50's car, why not drive THE over-chromed, over-styled '50's car!) 89-97 Cougar (Being born in '72, most of the stang cougars were retired by the time I really took intrest in cars. The aero-cat took Cougar from dowdy lounge-lizard that grandma drove to cool. The 89-97 were the best of the breed. I like T-birds from this era too.) '92-96 Ford Bronco '57 Ford Fairlane (It outsold the '57 Chevy) Aerostar Eddie Bauer And My 1996 Mercury Villager. Hands down, still-to-date, the BEST looking minivan ever produced.

I love when ad guys say ahead of time something will be more durable. You can't predict durability. Its proven over time. The panther is a durable vehicle. They take a beating and keep coming back for more. The Charger goes like stink, just as long as you don't mind replacing a tranny every 20k or so miles. BTW, the Grand Fury was unit bodied. Chrysler abandoned frames on all but imperial in the 50's. All of the classic Chrysler cars, including the Bluesmobile, were unit bodied. However, they were not near as suceptible to minor collisions as today's unit body cars are. The Grany Fury had about a foot of body beyond suspension components though, D3's don't have near that much, esp. since the bumper doesn't extend to the edge of the car.

The only one you can see is the Juke which is a crossover. Look, nobody is going to build a Bronco on a cut-down truck frame. Not going to happen. There is just not market for little 2-door off-roaders. The Wrangler is riding heavily on the unlimited version right now. You'd have to count on a 4-door version. Now you have a little unit body 4-door. Oh wait, Ford already builds the Escape. How about a two-door escape with a lift and havy-duty off-road components. Call it the Bronco and be done with it.

It could be unit-body, based off an existing platform. BUt converting it to that tough a vehicle would be a tall order.