Hot or Not?

Before it became a footnote in “hot or not” debates, the Mercury Cougar beat every other 1967 Detroit product to the Motor Trend Car of the Year award. Built on a name originally floated for the Mustang, it stretched that platform three inches longer and dressed it in a genuinely upscale cabin. Engine options topped out with a 320-horsepower 390 V8. Here’s what made this pony car different from the one it was compared to constantly.

Classic blue Mercury Cougar parked outdoors under sunlight.

A car that beat out the rest of Detroit‘s 1967 lineup for Car of the Year doesn’t usually end up buried in a “hot or not” debate decades later — and yet here we are. This one started life almost by accident, built on a name that was originally pitched for an entirely different Ford product before someone decided it deserved its own car. Underneath the hidden headlights and sequential taillights sat a genuinely different animal from its more famous pony car cousin, stretched, softened, and aimed at buyers who wanted muscle wrapped in something closer to a gentleman’s coupe. It worked well enough that it single-handedly accounted for nearly four in every ten cars Lincoln-Mercury sold that year. So was it actually hot, or just well-dressed?

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The Car Whose Name Was Almost a Mustang’s

“Cougar” was originally suggested as a name for the car that eventually became the Ford Mustang. After the Mustang‘s runaway success, Mercury needed its own sporty entry, and the Cougar name got a second chance when the car launched on September 30, 1966. It shared its chassis with the freshly revised 1967 Mustang but rode on a wheelbase stretched three inches to 111 inches, giving it a longer, more substantial stance than its Ford sibling. The formula worked immediately: the Cougar accounted for nearly 40 percent of the entire Lincoln-Mercury division’s sales in 1967 and won that year‘s Motor Trend Car of the Year award, the only Mercury ever to do so.

What Made the XR-7 the One to Own

The XR-7 trim pushed the Cougar further upmarket with leather and vinyl seating, an overhead console with a visual warning panel and map lights, door panels with integrated assist straps and map pockets, simulated walnut trim on the dash, and full toggle-switch gauges — a genuinely luxurious cabin for a car still built to run with V8 muscle. Engine choices ranged from a 289-cubic-inch V8 making 200 or 225 horsepower depending on carburetion up to a 390-cubic-inch “Marauder” V8 rated at 320 horsepower in GT form, giving buyers a real choice between comfort-focused cruising and genuine muscle car performance in the same body.