Sometimes a car comes around and you just don’t know what to think of it. The Lincoln Mercury Merkur XR4TI happens to be one of those cars.  Completely strange with the styling only the 80’s could have adopted, this car was one of Fords flops here in the states.

What powered this inverted bathtub with a double wing? Simply put a small turbo charged inline 4 leading into a limited slip differential. This car could do 0-60 in 7 seconds which was pretty good for the times. The Merkur’s failure is attributed to many, many things. Poor advertisements, bad price points, and a radio show host by the name of Jim Rome who swore to god that the car was infact “the biggest piece of crap ever”. While the car could put down 170 horsepower, the manual transmission was limited to 130MPH. Not very exciting when you consider the cares coming in the late 80’s and early 90’s. This car was no RX7, nor was it a fox body mustang. It was a contraption all on it’s own with an identity crisis.

While I have a passion for ugly cars myself: the Dodge Aries, the El Camino (it became worse with age folks) and the late 80’s Chrysler Town and Country, I look at that car and can only ask myself one thing. What kind of person looks at that and says “There it is! The car that I have been waiting my whole life for?”. Apparently there weren’t many, as the Merkur was only offered from 85 till 89