Merkur Vehicles

Overview

    The Merkur brand was invented in 1985 by Ford Motor Company out of whole cloth, as a sort of captive import for the North American market. Merkur-badged vehicles were sold through Lincoln-Mercury dealerships, to give those dealers an assortment of pseudo-sport/luxury vehicles to compete with various Audis and low-rung BMWs for the dollars of Euro-enthusiast buyers. The name, aside from being unimaginative (Merkur is just Mercury rendered into German), was unfortunate: meant to be pronounced mare-coor, it was usually rendered as Merk-er by Americans. In any event, since the Mercury brand didn't exist in Germany, Merkurs were nothing more than rebadged Ford of Europe models slightly retuned for American regulations. A compact hatchback (the XR4Ti) coupe based on the Ford Sierra came first, follow several years later by a hatchback sedan called the Scorpio. They had higher feature content than American Fords like the Taurus, but were considerably more expensive, partially thanks to exchange rates and import duties. Over the course of five model years (and with a peak of 300 dealerships), just over 64,000 Merkurs were sold in the United States. With these disappointing results, Ford cancelled the Merkur venture after the 1989 model year. Merkur was wholly owned by Ford Motor Company. Merkur's operations were run through the headquarts of Lincoln-Mercury, in Dearborn, Michigan. Merkur models were produced at the Ford Werke AG factory in Köln, North Rhine-Westphalia, Federal Republic of Germany, and at Karmann GmbH's Osnabrück, Lower Saxony factory.

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