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On Wheels by Brooks Peterson Archives | Arts & Entertainment | Audio/Video | Business | Classifieds | Columns | Food | Forums | Health & Fitness | News | Obits | Opinions | People | Politics | Science/Technology | Search | Sports | Subscribe | Travel | Weather Published by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. CLICK FOR NEWSPAPER DELIVERY Saturday, July 14, 2001 An updated yestercarMercury Grand Marquis LS boosts driving experience with its handling package
Big. Really Big. Verily, campers, this is no wee slip of a car, nossir. This is one hunka hunka burnin', churnin' automotive battlewagon, the way we useta make 'em before OPEC, Nader, and deranged suburbanites in SUVs ushered us into this brave but surpassingly strange new world. Spacious. In the last quarter century or so, we have accustomed ourselves to vehicles that, whatever their other attributes, force us into rather closer proximity than used to be the case in the prototypical family sedan. This thing, now . . . you could rent out the back seat as a duplex. Roomy as all outdoors. No need to get up close and personal with your fellow travelers . . . unless, of course, you want to do so.
Arrogant. Yeah, that's right: arrogant. Cars like the Grand Marquis and its (virtual) twin, the Ford Crown Victoria, project a fine disdain for such concerns as negotiating decreasing-radius turns and coping with confined spaces like the ones you encounter at Der Postalbunker (a.k.a., the downtown post office). Practicality be damned. Too much of a good thing is . . . a better thing. Another adjective There is, however, an adjective that most car buffs probably wouldn't apply to this car. Maybe it's a flaw in my character - I have a large and flourishing correction of flaws, after all - but the fact is that I find this big ol' anachronistic hunker . . . Seductive.
There: I've said it. The kid I used to be - the kid who experienced a kind of secular epiphany when he picked up his first copy of Road & Track, with its intoxicating tales of lean, lithe, slinky continental machines - would gag to hear me admit as much. But . . . Big ol' honkers like the Grand Marquis and the Crown Vic used to be the norm; now, in a sense, they are replicars in their own time, not unlike the boxy Volvo 240s that continued in production into the early '90s. Call 'em yestercars. EPA mileage But don't call 'em antiques. While they embody a bygone ethos, they are most definitely not relics. Don't believe it? Check those EPA mileage figures: 18 mpg city, 25 mpg highway. Anybody ever get that kind of abstemiousness from a '67 Caprice or a '74 New Yorker?
The heart of this show, my friends, is a drivetrain that is - at least for Detroit - state-of-the-art. Sure, that's still a good Amurrican V-8 under the hood, but it displaces a relatively petite 4.6 liters. And it incorporates such stuff as an overhead cam, fuel injection and the all but omnipresent electronic wizardry that has blighted the careers of shade-tree mechanics but has made possible all sorts of good stuff, including powerful engines that deliver decent gas mileage. Oh, and speaking of power: Since our Grand Marquis included the Handling Package (beefed up suspension and other mildly sporty goodies), it arrived with more energetic V-8: 235 hp compared with the 220 you get in the basic package. A freebie? If I read the mildly puzzling sticker aright, the Handling Package costs you, well, nothing: "NO CHARGE." Says so right there. Perhaps it's a freebie with the top-of-the-line LS? At any rate, even if you had to ante up for it, it would be a hurtin' deal: gets you, in addition to the aforementioned goodies, a lower (i.e., numerically higher) axle ratio of 3.27, those handsome aluminum wheels, rear air suspension and the all-important dual exhausts. (You might want to slip some aftermarket chrome tips on 'em. As is, they look a bit plain.) Another gotta-have option, antilock brakes and traction, does come at a price - $775. Go for it. A vehicle this hefty needs all the help it can get in the whoa-Nellie department. Out on the road, all of good techno stuff and the Grand Marquis' retro-think ambience combine to make . . . beautiful music? That depends on your taste in music. I suspect, however, that more than a few skeptics might shed their preconceived notions were they to spend a little time behind the wheel of the Merc. Rewarding features It has struck me before when driving some of the recent iterations of the American Big Car: These things are surprisingly manageable. Not what you'd call nimble, but they're lighter on their feet than you'd expect.
The Handling Package, in particular, elevates the Grand Marquis driving experience from routine to fairly rewarding. It'll yaw and heel under duress in the turns, but it remains controllable under all but the most ridiculous demands. Come to terms with the car, and with its assigned mission in the automotive cosmos, and you can clip along quite briskly. Nor is the big Merc a slug: Granted, those 235 horses have to work for a living, but the Grand Marquis responds briskly enough when you mash down on the loud pedal. And once you get up to speed, you know you can keep rolling serenely along all day at fairly dramatic velocities. Not that you should, of course. Room to stretch out Then there's the luxury that more than a few hi-buck European and Japanese sedans can't match: that stretch-out room I already mentioned. Our tester departed from tradition in one respect, featuring five-passenger rather than six-passenger seating. A console-mounted shifter might seem to be a touch bizarre for such a vehicle, but in practice the arrangement worked nicely enough. (You can, by the way, opt for the traditional six-sat format.) The interior, however, leaves you with an even more powerful impression: a feeling, at least for one of my generation, of coming home. The cues are everywhere: that big swath of fakewood (er, woodtone appliqué) across the dash and the door panels; the old-timey odometer with the miles indicated on those little cylindrical-drum counters; the cushy leather upholstery that actually smelled like leather; and the stereo with cassette player. (A six-disc CD changer nestles in the enormous trunk.) Perfectly satisfactory, but I found myself thinking an eight-track player should be somewhere on the option list. It was not without a twinge of regret that I watched the repo man take off in the big Merc. At the end of the day, it's more than a car (and a pretty good one). It's a living link with our automotive legacy - and a reminder that some of the old ways may not have been so hopelessly klutzy after all. 
© 2000 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved. |
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