Poor Cougar, always forgotten in the big shadow of its Mustang sibling! I found this car parked just down the street from the '61 Valiant of a couple weeks ago.
By 1973, the Mustang and Cougar had become the Fat Elvis version of their former selves. The '73 Cougar weighed in at 3396 pounds, nearly 400 pounds more than the '67 model.
But, like Fat Elvis, they still had some style. Vegas style, sure, but that counts too! The standard engine for the '73 Cougar was a 168-horse 351 Cleveland. However, a 254-horsepower Cobra Jet 351C was available, as was a 4-speed manual transmission.
Did any other car have rear bodywork quite like this?
This car could use some paint, but it's definitely a number of notches above beater status.
Now that's a Mercury!
Compare this Mercury's headlight area to that of the '71 Monterey we saw here a while back. It's true that Mercury had to make do with rebadged Fords, but the designers did what they could to make them stand out from their blue oval brethren.
The rear view looks almost Ranchero-esque.
Cougars had the super-cool sequential turn-signals, which gave a sort of Vegas neon-style appearance to the car when turning. Of course, the system relied on a motor-driven control device that usually went bad within a couple years, but it was great that they did such a thing in the pre-digital-controller era.