Jalopnik: mercury comet

Day Of The Cat: 1973 Lincolns And Mercuries Greet The Dawn Of Malaise!

Murilee Martin — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:00:00 EDT

The cage door creeeeeaks open, (perhaps suggesting the rust that will soon assail most Malaise Lincolns and Mercuries), and the angry mountain lion struts out into a field full of parked cars. The Continental... the Marquis... Montego... Comet... Cougar... they're all here, and they're all packing more bloat and less power than ever before.

1964 Mercury Comet Cyclone, With Bonus Mercury Poll

Murilee Martin — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:00:00 EDT

I enjoy the nice, shiny, well-preserved cars in this series, of course, but I really love me some beaters! Cars that haven't been coddled for one minute of their decades-long lives! This Cyclone is one of my all-time favorite Alameda cars; an original 289/4-speed machine, it's been roaring around the island for at least the last 15 years and probably longer. It sounds good, looks mean, and lives on a busy street. Sure, it's slowly rusting away, but it's got decades to go before the slow-motion California-style rust finally brings it down.

I've talked to the owner of this car a few times (we were neighbors for a couple years in the late 1990s) and he's extremely proud of his wheels. As I recall, he's either the original owner or the second owner, and he has plans to get the body and paint done... someday.

There's some rust-through on the hood, but you figure it took 44 years to get this bad... plenty of time to fix the body!

The Cyclone name was later applied to a separate Mercury model (the Merc version of the Fairlane/Torino), but in '64 it was the high-performance package for Mercury's Falcon clone. You got the 210-horse 289, some racy-looking emblems, and bucket seats when you opted for the '64 Comet Cyclone.

I'm puzzled by this car's vanity plate. There was a slot-car shop in town for a while, so perhaps the Cyclone's owner was the owner.

First 200 DOTS

Drive Phoenix To LA Very Slowly In a 1974 Mercury, Get Crap Mileage!

Murilee Martin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:20:00 EDT

How is it possible that a car weighing just over 2,200 pounds and equipped with a 2-liter engine can drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles at the maddeningly geriatric speed of 50 miles per hour and manage only a pathetic 32.4 miles per gallon? Yes, that's the best the '74 Capri could do! We're thinking it was the weight of several tons of Malaise pushing down hard on the car during the trip (not to mention the restrictive first-gen catalytic converters and miserable engine compression ratios of the era). The six-cylinder Comet made the same trip and grunted out an Saudi-oil-baron-pleasing 26.6 MPG, so we shudder to imagine the sort of single-digit mileage a 460-equipped Country Squire would have achieved.

1965 Mercury Comet 202

Murilee Martin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:30:00 EDT

Hey, if you shoot enough photos of old cars on the streets of Alameda, sooner or later you'll get a shot that looks something like a Robert Bechtle painting! The photo above made me almost happy enough to forget my frustration that there's a super-original, 4-speed-equipped '68 AMX parked a couple doors down from this Comet... in a driveway, and thus off-limits to DOTS. The pain!

And believe me, Alameda has plenty of DOTSworthy cars parked tantalizingly out of reach in driveways. Say, this Volvo Bertone, not to mention a 50s Land Rover, several Barracudas, a showroom-condition big-block '65 Impala, and... well, you get the idea. But never mind that- let's look at this fairly solid Comet, which is fair game for the roving DOTS camera!

Charles Bukowski drove a Comet, though his was a few years older than this one. Still, that bestows some literary cachet upon the little Mercury.

The '65 Comet 202 2-door listed at $2,108, which was $131 more than the mechanically identical 2-door Ford Falcon. What were you paying for when you got the Merc? Well, mostly you got a nameplate with more status than Henry's surname. But you also got some handsome styling touches, such as these taillights.

Not only did you get snazzified styling when you got Mercury's version of the Falcon, you got images of the Roman god of profit all over the car!