Mercury built the Cougar on Mustang bones but dressed it up like something imported from Europe, hidden headlights and all — a formula that won Car of the Year in its debut season. By the end of the decade the car had produced two of the rarest engines in the entire pony-car family, with just two units of one configuration ever built. Read on for the numbers behind the rarity.
Every pony car launched in the mid-1960s had to answer the same question: what makes you different from the Mustang everyone is already buying? Mercurys answer was to build essentially the same car underneath and dress it up like something imported from Europe — hidden headlights, vertical grille bars, sequential turn signals tucked out of sight. It worked well enough to win Car of the Year honors in its debut season, and then it kept drifting further from its Mustang roots until, by the end of the decade, it had built two of the rarest engines Fords entire pony-car family ever produced, buried inside a model most casual buyers thought of as simply the fancier Mustang.
A Showroom Debut Timed to the Day
The Cougar arrived on dealer floors on September 30, 1966, giving Mercury an entry in the increasingly crowded pony-car subclass. That first year offered a hardtop body in either base trim or the more upscale XR-7, the latter featuring an imitation wood-grain dash, black-face instruments, toggle switches, vinyl or leather upholstery, and an overhead console — plus a floor-mounted “T” shifter for buyers who chose the Merc-O-Matic automatic, a genuinely upscale package compared to the Mustang it was built alongside. Mercury dealers used that upscale positioning heavily in advertising, pitching the Cougar directly at buyers who wanted pony-car performance without feeling like they were driving the exact same car as everyone else on the block.
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European Flare on a Mustang Foundation
Mercury based the Cougars engineering on the Mustang platform but gave it entirely different sheet metal aimed at a more European feel. The full-width vertical-bar grille hid the headlights, and the rear treatment echoed the front with sequential turn signals partially concealed behind similar vertical bars — a distinctive enough look that Motor Trend named it Car of the Year in its debut season, a genuine coup for a brand-new nameplate competing against established rivals. The award gave Mercury an enormous marketing advantage in the Cougars first year, one that rival brands with more established pony-car entries could not easily counter.
Entry-Level Power, or the GT Step-Up
The base engine was a two-barrel 289-cubic-inch V8 making 200 horsepower, while stepping up to the GT package brought a four-barrel 390-cubic-inch V8 rated at 335 horsepower, along with a proper handling package, upgraded brakes, better tires, and a low-restriction exhaust system — available on either the base Cougar or the XR-7, giving buyers a genuinely broad spread of performance and trim combinations right from launch, and dealers reported that the GT package in particular moved briskly among buyers who wanted genuine performance credentials to go along with the cars upscale European-inspired styling.
Drifting Toward Luxury, One Model Year at a Time
Even with strong performance options always on the table, the Cougar began drifting from its pony-car roots almost immediately, gradually becoming a luxury-oriented personal car. By 1970, that shift showed up in details like a fashion-designer-collaboration houndstooth vinyl top with a matching interior — a world away from the performance-first pitch of the original 1967 launch, and a clear signal of where the nameplate was ultimately headed in the decade that followed, as the entire pony-car segment gradually shifted its marketing emphasis from raw performance toward comfort, style, and personal luxury as the 1970s approached.
Two Boss 429s and Only Two Ever Built
During the 1969 model year, Mercury added a convertible to the Cougar lineup and switched the grille bars from vertical to horizontal, adding a spoiler and making Ram Air with a hood scoop available as options. An Eliminator performance package offered a 390-cubic-inch four-barrel, a Boss 302, or a 428 Cobra Jet — but the rarest configuration by far was the Boss 429, of which exactly two Cougars were ever built, making them the scarcest Cougars in existence and among the rarest Ford-family muscle cars from any era. Collectors who specialize in factory-rare Ford-family muscle cars consider tracking down and verifying one of these two Boss 429 Cougars something close to a lifetime pursuit.
The XR7-G: A Power Icon With Real Rarity
Mercury positioned the XR7-G as its power-icon trim, loaded with a hood scoop, hood pins, and Lucas fog lamps. Buyers wanting maximum performance could specify the 428 Cobra Jet engine within the XR7-G package, but only 14 units were built with that combination — one of the rarest genuine factory Cougar configurations from the entire first generation, and a car that surfaces for sale only once every several years, and when one does appear at auction it typically draws attention from buyers well outside the usual Cougar collector community.
The 428 Cobra Jets Brief GT-E Run
Starting April 1, 1968, the 428 Cobra Jet with Ram Air became available on a handful of GT-E models. The factory built only 394 GT-E Cougars total, and just 37 of those actually received the 428 — conservatively rated at 335 horsepower, but developing 410 with the Ram Air option engaged. Every GT-E came standard with power front disc brakes, a genuinely serious specification for a model most buyers never even knew existed on the order sheet, since Mercury did comparatively little to promote the GT-E package compared to the more visible Eliminator and XR7-G options.
A Restyle That Retired the Signature Details
1970 brought minor updates — side marker lights, seat-belt shoulder harnesses, and a larger 302-cubic-inch base V8 rated at 210 horsepower with a two-barrel carburetor, introduced mid-year. But the bigger change came in 1971, when the Cougars entire shell was redesigned: the hidden headlights lost their retractable mechanism, and the wipers, previously exposed, became permanently concealed — closing out the design language that had defined the cars first generation and setting the stage for an even more luxury-focused decade to come, one that would eventually move the Cougar nameplate almost entirely away from the performance identity it had launched with back in 1967, when the sequential taillights and hidden headlights first convinced buyers this was something genuinely different from every other pony car on the lot.
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Cough love them I have a tattoo of a 1970 emblem on my fore arm.
The 67 and 68 Cougars were special cats! Shaped like an arrowhead and looks like it is moving even when the engine is off! Mercury division, in their stupidity, boogered it up in ’69. Not worth having after 68.