During the 1980s, the Detroit car companies felt repeated urges to get more European with some of their offerings. Ford, with its thriving European operations, opted to create the Merkur marque to sell a pair of German-made machines in the United States. One was the sporty XR4Ti, based on the high-performance version of the Ford Sierra and using the same turbocharged Pinto engine as the Mustang SVO, and that car sold acceptably well. The other was an Americanized Ford Scorpio, which was an interesting car but sold poorly. Here’s an extremely rare ’88 Scorpio, spotted in a Denver self-service wrecking yard last month.
Power came from a 2.9-liter version of the Cologne pushrod V6.
The Cologne pushrod V6 engine had been around since the early 1960s, though Americans didn’t see it in US-market Fords until the Capri and its 2.6-liter Cologne became available in 1972 (Pintos got 2.8-liter Colognes starting in 1975). The Merkur Scorpio had a 2.9-liter version, rated at 144 horsepower. A 5-speed manual transmission was standard, but found few takers in the United States.
Pronounced “mare-KOOR”
It was unfortunate that the villain in the first “Dirty Harry” movie was named Scorpio, but that film was 17 years old by the time the Merkur Scorpio became available. More unfortunate for Ford was the car’s price tag: $24,048, plus the cost of the optional automatic transmission that most buyers felt was not optional. That’s about $51,500 in 2018 dollars; the 1988 BMW 528e cost $31,500 and had less power, but had prestige that this new and weird marque lacked. The $21,995 Saab 900 Turbo, with its 160 horses, seemed like a steal next to the Scorpio, but the technology-packed $17,999 Nissan Maxima would have been even harder to resist; granted, both those cars had front-wheel-drive.
Those competing cars didn’t have double-jointed glovebox mechanisms, though!
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