Forbes.com Review

[213Cobra]

This is a long post. I'm new here, but expect to buy a Marauder. I currently have an SVT Cobra, an SVT Contour, a Harley pickup and a C4 Corvette. It's been interesting seeing the skirmishing between Impala SS devotees and MM owners here, since I have a Chevy LT4 and an SVT 4 cammer in my own little fleet. By the way, everything some of you have been experiencing regarding performance improvements after a few thousand miles is entirely consistent with what I experienced with my 32 valve 1996 Cobra. 65,000 miles into its life, it is defintely a stronger runner than when it was new, even discounting mods.

Anyway, today Forbes.com reviewed the Mercury Marauder. I thought y'all might be interested. I have pasted it into this posting below, but first, I posted my response which I sent to the writer today. After you read the review, I encourage you who like your MMs to take a few minutes to send your own thoughts to the reviewer, Charles Dubow. You can email him at cdubow@forbes.net . You can tell Charles doesn't get out of Manhattan much, but for this car to be understood, guys like him have to get some evidence that there's a constituency for the MM. Let's give him some. His full contact info is:

Charles Dubow
Executive Editor
Forbes.com
28 West 23rd Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10010-5204
Tel: (212) 366-8815
Fax: (212) 366-8804
E-Mail: cdubow@forbes.net

Here's my note to Charles first, then the review is in the next message in the thread.

Mr. Dubow,

Clearly, you've misunderstood the intent of the Mercury Marauder. It's not a muscle car in the 1960s coupe vein, it is a muscle sedan, in the tradition of the Impala SS from the '60s and the '90s, as well as the big motor versions of Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Ford, Mercury and Chrysler sedans of years gone by. Suggesting that a BMW 325i is an alternative to the Marauder reflects a complete misunderstanding of the Mercury, its intent and its market. A 6'+ driver like me cannot sit behind himself in a BMW 3.

If you want to understand who will buy this car and why, check out the forum at the Marauder enthusiasts' web site, http://www.mercurymarauder.net/forums/.

First, you allege the BMW 325i is "zippier". It's not. With an automatic transmission outfitted with similar amenities, the 325i tests to be a mid-7 second car. With all of 184 horses. It weighs almost 1000 pounds less than the Mercury and has very little grunt off the line. But more to the point, the BMW and its competitor-pretenders have puny back seats and small trunks, with barely enough room up front for anyone blessed with height.

As a muscle sedan or executive express, the Marauder excels. Room for 4 six-footers when needed. Cargo space for golf bags, salesman's samples, trip luggage, whatever. And a liberal dose of anti-effete medication in the form of sound, look and power.

The whole point of the car is to not saddle its owner with the fou-fou pretense of weenie cars like a BMW, Acura, Lexus, Infiniti or, God forbid, that other "Merc" the Mercedes. It's simple & direct, authoritative, bourbon-with-a-splash cool. Mercury wants to sell 10 - 20 thousand of these cars per year. There are plenty of guys in the 30 - 50 age range who want a muscular car that looks good around town and that can eat a continent's worth of road. For such things, a BMW and its ilk are wholly unsuitable. Ever take a 1500 mile trip in a 3- series? It's a God-awful appliance for such an endeavor.

The Marauder interior is fine, and perfectly within the muscle sedan tradition. Its dash signals its sedan roots, of course, but it is charcoal and aluminum, with straightforward gauging and a shifter between the seats where it belongs. It is exactly what a muscle sedan like this needs. No wrap-around cosseting for this crowd. All the feel-good is in the motor and the handling. Perfect. We who would consider this car are sick to death of the needless pretense of the Euro-trash interior aesthetic and Asian bland.

The BMW gets the girls? Well, the 325 *is* a chick car. In a time when Jennifer Lopez sings about Escalades, do you really think man's-woman girls prefer the effete company of a 3-series driver over the gloss-black authenticity of a Marauder dude? There are only a few hundred of these things on the streets so far. Here in Los Angeles, seeing a couple of Marauders on Sunset on a Saturday night, I can tell you you're dead-wrong. You think people don't have sex in cars anymore? You haven't been outside Manhattan lately.

Power? Sure, a 4000 pound car could use some more. There are easy ways to get some. That 32 valve motor is a relative of the SVT Cobra motor in naturally aspirated form. Gears and some breathing improvements plus a chip can give it some more kick. But this isn't a drag racer. The Ford 4 cammer is a world-class piece made to sing at speed. It comes into its own deep into the revs. A set of 3.73s or 4.10s in the pumpkin, an X-pipe, a chip and a Pro-M MAF can give it a little extra grunt, or a supercharger can be dropped in to add 80 or 100 horsepower while keeping the total price under 40 Grand. But naturally aspirated, it takes very little to get the Marauder down to a sub 7 second car.

Is the Marauder cool enough to find its quota of buyers? Damn straight it is. It's Steve McGarrett's car in 2003 and that resonates with a lot of guys who have been abandoned by the excessive refinement brigade in autodom.

Best regards,

Phil

Phil Ressler
pressler@wwc.com
Los Angeles, CA

[213Cobra]

The Review:

Test Drives
2003 Mercury Marauder
Charles Dubow

Overview
When I pulled up in front of my apartment building, my doorman went wild for the new Mercury Marauder. "Nice car," he said. "What is it?"

His ignorance is understandable. The Marauder is Mercury's attempt at reintroducing into the current day the once-popular muscle car, those testosterone-laden dinosaurs, like the Pontiac GTO and the Plymouth Barracuda, that roamed the American highway during the 1960s and 1970s. Although Mercury was once as capable of producing muscle cars--such as the original 1963 Marauder--with the best of them, to most buyers today the marque is known, if it is known for anything, for turning out uninspiring knockoffs of its big brother Ford Motor (nyse: F - news - people ).

HIGHS:
Gutsy engine; sure-footed handling

LOWS:
Cheap interior; not enough power; high sticker price; who's going to buy it?

But after the initial confusion wears off it becomes easy to detect beneath the Marauder's black, bad-boy exterior (Mercury will soon be introducing a dark blue paintjob) and chrome hubcaps the car for what it really is: A Grand Marquis with a souped-up engine.

In fact, despite the throaty growl of its 302-horsepower V-8, the car still has the prosaic, wide-bodied looks of a sedan that suggests Perry Como more than Bruce Springsteen.

Of course, the executives at Mercury imagine it otherwise. With one of the oldest customer bases in the business, the company is trying to reposition itself to attract some of that desirable 25-to-35-year-old buying power.

The timing is good. Muscle cars are back in vogue. As Boomers hit middle-age they are naturally drawn again to the cars of their youth, and Chevrolet Chevelles and Dodge Chargers, whether in cherry condition or badly in need of an overhaul, are selling well on Web sites like eBay Motors.

Similarly, in a time when most 20-year-olds are driving small, zippy cars like the Ford Focus or the Acura Integra, like a vegetarian secretly hungering after a cheeseburger, there is an almost atavistic desire lurking just below the surface for something more brutal. How else do you explain the popularity of videogames like Grand Theft Auto and films like last year's The Fast and the Furious?

Despite its pedigree and its good intentions--that the world should have more high-performance cars rather than less--does the new Marauder have the authenticity, the genuine "cool" it needs to be accepted as a true, new heir to the muscle car tradition, or is it merely a pretender trying to trade on a nostalgia for Detroit iron that will never come again?

From The Driver's Seat

Ford has done a better job with other special-edition interiors.

To begin with, in case there are members of the driving public out there who have never revved up a true Detroit V-8 and heard it roar, this is what it sounds like: There's that low, satisfying VRROOOOM that isn't as refined as, say, one of those expensive exquisites from Italy or Germany. This is an engine that lacks table manners and drinks out of the carton and it feels good.

The Marauder's dual-overhead-camshaft, 32-valve, 281-cubic-inch V-8 produces 318 pound-feet of torque, which means that it not only sounds sweet but also that you can rocket down the road with more power and speed than almost anything else in its price range. (The sport suspension and speed-sensitive variable-assist steering add to the fun.) Try playing catch with a Porsche 911 and see the surprised look on the other driver's face.

But no matter how much you might spin your tires don't expect the Marauder to peel out like a drag racer.

The engine would have to produce a lot more torque to get this 4,195-lb. bruiser from 0 to 60mph faster than its acceptable but not particularly potent 7.5 seconds. This is a big car, as befits its Grand Marquis origins. There is a roomy back seat, plenty of legroom, spacious trunk and other vestiges of its alter ego that would be fine if you were cruising at 25 mph through Boca but in this incarnation serve only to weigh it down both physically and metaphorically.

Hopefully, that problem may be solved soon. At this year's auto shows Mercury debuted a supercharged V-8 Marauder concept car that boasts a much mightier 335 horsepower and 355 foot-pounds of torque. With any luck, this ought to give future Marauders enough real muscle to tear up the pavement with the best of them.

While the engine might remind many of Detroit's glory days, the interior is more reminiscent of when the Big Three went wrong. Unlike, say, the Japanese or the Germans, since the late 1970s American automakers either forgot how, or chose not to, craft attractive interiors. The expanses of dull vinyl and plastic, the cheap knobs and shifts, the unimaginative layouts are a far cry from the stripped-down masculinity of the original muscle cars.

This is not to say that the interior of the Marauder should look like that of a Lexus. That would be all wrong. It doesn't need burled wood, supple glove-quality leather or kinetically designed cantilevered dashboard controls. But it does need its own personality--which it sorely lacks currently. Like a child's toy gun, sitting behind the wheel of the Marauder feels more like a being in a plastic replica of a muscle car, rather than the real thing.


Big, yes, and powerful...


Of course, most guys could personalize it in the time-honored fashion--by tossing several weeks' worth of McDonald's wrappers, old newspapers, single sneakers, half-empty jugs of antifreeze and soda cans into the back seat but, unfortunately, no matter how much crud builds up, dirty doesn't mean authentic, it just means dirty.

Assuming that you want to keep your car clean, though, the Marauder's interior capaciousness, while nice in nearly almost any other car, actually works against it. In the old days, it was nice to have an ample back seat so that you and your date could go neck out at Lookout Point. But people don't neck in cars the way they once did, so the question arises: why do you need so much space in a muscle car?


...but it's still a Grand Marquis.


The answer is you don't. This isn't a family car, after all. But because Mercury is shackled to the long wheelbase--nearly 18 feet--of the Grand Marquis, which comes only as a sedan, the Marauder perforce is one, too. Would this car be cooler as a coupe, particularly if the designers gave the body a little more attention than a coat of black point? (Like the spare yet selfishly hip Corvette.) You bet it would. It would also significantly reduce the car's weight and make it go faster.

Should You Buy This Car?

There's another dimension to why extra space in the new Marauder doesn't really work. In the past, all cars were boats, thousands of pounds of steel, chrome and Naugahyde went into every one, and fuel consumption in those heady post-World War II days was as alien a concept as friendly diplomatic relations with the Russians.

That's all changed, of course. But what has changed the most is that these days young drivers aren't looking to shell out $33,000 for a big Mercury. For that kind of money, they can start looking at cars, like the BMW 325i, that are zippier, get better gas mileage, have a better resale value, are more sophisticated, and go a lot farther impressing members of the opposite sex than a butched-out Grand Marquis. True, you might be able to blow the back doors off a 325i in your Marauder, but the girls will be riding in the other guy's car.

It's all a comment on the changing face of America.

The number of young, working-class white men who were the original targets for the muscle cars is shrinking. Their modern equivalents are upwardly mobile and, because engines are much more complicated than they used to be, it has become increasingly difficult to spend a whole afternoon with your friends tinkering out back on the motor of a late model Corvette or Mustang, unless of course you have a multithousand-dollar computer-based engine diagnostics machine.

So, the market doesn't exist for muscle cars the way it once did. The fancy imports and American copycats aren't the only ones to blame. SUVs and pickups have replaced muscle cars in the national male psyche as the vehicles that combine the natural urge for ruggedness with the basic need for transportation. To be sure, there might be some boomers out there who want to hear the V-8 rumble of their youths without the hassle of buying an old car. And, also, there might be some younger buyers who simply like the fact that Detroit can still turn out a car with cojones.

Then again, those guys already have a car to trick out and drag race--it's called the Mustang, and Mercury's parent, Ford, cranks out V-8 editions of those cars by the tens of thousands every year and sells them for $10,000 less.

More likely, most buyers will appreciate the Marauder for its novelty value. At first, that is. Unless it is able to either step up the interior design and introduce a supercharged engine into production, or lower the price and change the body style so that the car is competitive with hot-selling pocket rockets like the Acura RSX, Mercury will pay the price for being too cheap to have made the Marauder right in the first place.

So, in sum, while Mercury deserves credit for trying to revive the muscle car, it hasn't succeeded. If you really want to drive a muscle car, our advice is skip the Marauder and find a classic one on the Internet.

[SergntMac]

Hubcaps?

[MAD-3R]

The expanses of dull vinyl and plastic, the cheap knobs and shifts, the unimaginative layouts are a far cry from the stripped-down masculinity of the original muscle cars.

Vinyl? Cheap Knobs? What the hell was he driving?

[MAD-3R]

I would take some of these reviews more seriously if they told us how long the drove the car for. Milage, time, and longest trip.

[RF Overlord]

This guy must be just outta college...is the MM faster than a 1968 Charger 440 or a '69 Impala SS 427 4-gear (one of my dream cars)? Obviously not, but it will sure out-handle and out-brake them...and look damn good while doing it!

As far as our ages go, I admit I'm 46 and I LOVE this car, but just see the posting asking if any owners are under 35...Hell, even this forum's Big Kahuna administrator is 29!!!

No, the MM as it currently sits is not ideal, but it's the best car out there for my dollar...I can't stand the whine those little ricer cars make with their beer-keg mufflers and 1.8L motors...(the STARTER in my Buick is bigger than that!)

BTW, my first car was a 1960 Chevrolet Biscayne with the 235 inch straight six and 2-speed automatic...now THAT was a boat!

[SSMOKEM]

Hey Phil,

I congratulate you on the nice and to the point reply to that article.

People these days are totally clueless when it comes to cars, especially in the media centers like New York. I'm sure the attitude at Forbes has a lot to do with it. Money talks and the most expensive car wins. I'm actually suprised they even tested the Marauder.

Hey RF Overlord,

I bought a brand new 1968 Impala 427/425hp with a Muncie M22 rock crusher when I turned 21. Boy, did I have fun in that one racing up and down Woodward Ave. in Detroit!

Took it down to the dragstrip right after I bought it and ran 13.7 @ 103, bone stock, down to the tires, and you know how crappy the tires were back then I did get 5 to 7 mpg on Sunoco 260..........

[RF Overlord]

SSMOKEM:

STOP IT! I am SO jealous...I've only seen ONE of those up close, and that was back in '78...bet you wish you still owned it...and at 35 cents a gallon, who cared about gas mileage. 'course you'd go bankrupt trying to drive it today...sigh...

[SSMOKEM]

Yeah, I sure wish I had it now. But all is not lost, as soon as the 65 pickup project is done, I'm going hunitng for a 68 Impala, but I'll just install the 502 in it

I had to sell it after 2 years due to insurance costs. In 1970 I grossed around $9000, and a 1000 of it had to go to insurance!!

[mtnh]

Phil, that was a great letter to the editor. You have a very good command of the English language, and the way that you worded the letter should make a great point with the reviewer. Something that people allow to slip is that these cars also provide space to folks who would be rather cramped for space in today's mainstream cars. I've had co-workers in my cars that looked so out of place due to their size that there would appear to be a sizeable segment of the automotive buying public that just needs a larger car. Or truck. Or leather Marauder jacket. There is not alot of choice out there for a car with moderate to plus-sized drivers. Some end up in pickup trucks (full-size, of course), some end up in suburbans or other vans. With the grand marquis and crown vic, there is a choice for a car that fits more people than other cars. The Marauder blends right into that segment nicely. I'm 46 and have been driving a 1993 Grand Marquis, a 1996 Grand Marquis, and now, a 2003 MM. I've been in these cars for 10 years, since I turned 36. This is hardly a replacement for a 60s muscle car. I entered into the GM cars because I had a 3500# boat to tow and a family of 5. Plus, I refuse to get sucked into the front wheel drive mindset. There simply are not enough choices out there in rear-wheel drive in cars that can do the above.

Again, great letter and welcome to the club.

Mike

2000 Lincoln LS
2003 MM

[tetsu]

That guy who wrote for Forbes must not have even sat in the car.

Vinyl? There is no vinyl anywhere on the car.

Hubcaps? This guy is an automotive reviewer?

BMW 325i? He needs to aim higher, I would compare it to the 745il. ($60k anyone?)

Phil was dead on in his response. If you want a car to attract a lady an Escalade is definitely the way to go. And anyone can drive an Escalade and look cool... young guy... old geezer... you name it... Escalades are just way cool.

Marauders are for car lovers with "obligations" of some type: travel, kids, clients.

Johnny

[Mikeenh]

GREAT JOB PHIL!
One of the things I do with my MM is tow a 1,700 car carrier with a 4,000 pound 1936 DeSoto Airflow on it. There are times when I look in the mirror and get scared.I see headligts in my back window. I foget I'm towing it tows so nice. Try that with a 325 or any other size Bimmer.
I must have got one of the more dressed up MM's, I don't have hubcaps or vinyl seats :p

[LincMercLover]

Chic magnet...? I think the MM does the job. I don't know how many girls have said, "Oh my god! You got rid of that nice Lincoln? Well, you did good non-the-less... Nice car! Can I take a ride?" Of course I have to remind them that the Lincoln is just taking a break this winter and invite them to my back seat. I love the car, it's just plain bad ass!

I know... I saw hub caps and was like, they HAD to give this guy a black GM/CV... no way!

The dude's a dueshe, plain and simple...

[nomad]

GREAT letter Phil!! With your permission,I'd like to send a copy of your original letter with my own .02. Just can't let this guy get away with this slur on a very nice piece of American iron

[SergntMac]

"DuBow! Get over here, sonny, you need a slap!"

Nice work, Phil, thanks for stepping up. However, my father would have been a bit more direct.