Junkyard Find: 1982 Mercury Cougar GS Two-door Sedan
Published: December 30th, 2019
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The Mercury Cougar went through numerous platform and image changes during its 34 years of production, and I’ve managed to document examples of just about all of those changes during the course of my junkyard journeys. One generation of Cougar that remained a tough one to find, however, was the 1980-1982 fifth-generation cat, the first of the Fox-body Cougars and the boxiest of the bunch.Finally, I discovered this green-on-green-on-some-more-green ’82 GS two-door sedan in a California self-service yard — yet another vehicle sure to result in many bitter tears from my Ford-obsessed colleague, Sajeev Mehta.
The GS sat at the bottom of the Cougar prestige totem pole in 1982, and the two-door sedan was the cheapest GS that year.
The MSRP on this very green machine started at $7,983, which amounts to about $21,775 in 2019 dollars. Meanwhile, Ford shoppers could get the nearly-identical Fairmont Futura two-door for $6,619.
$6,619 was the price for the six-cylinder Fairmont, though; the Pinto-engined version cost a mere $5,985. The 1982 Cougar had no four-cylinder engine available; instead, buyers could choose between a 200-cubic-inch (3.3-liter) straight-six rated at 87 horsepower or a 3.8-liter V6 good for 112 horses. If you wanted a Cougar with a V8 that year, you needed to get the upscale XR-7, which could be purchased with the 255-cubic-inch (4.2-liter) eight and its 120 horsepower. This car has the “Thriftpower” straight-six, which later served as the basis for the four-cylinder HSC engine used in Tempos and poverty-spec Tauruses. As far as I can tell, all 1982 Cougars came with automatic transmissions.
If you like green plastic, green velour-influenced fabric, and unashamedly fake wood trim, you’ll love this car’s interior. It’s in very nice condition, suggesting that it spent most of its life pampered in a garage.
Look, it even has the optional clock! I didn’t buy this clock for my collection, because I knew I’d destroy the crumbly, fragile instrument-cluster plastic in the process and I wanted to leave it intact for Bay Area Fox-body parts shoppers.
Starting in 1983, the Cougar went back to being unabashedly sporty, with the station wagon and four-door versions axed forever and the two-doors becoming proper coupes.
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Lincoln-Mercury dealers offered a New Economic Policy on option packages!
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Of course, the XR-7 Fox Cougar came with 64-percent better MPG (than the enormous 1975 version) and 100-percent more snarling mountain lions than the non-XR-7.Want more Junkyard Finds? You’ll find links to better than 1,800 of them at the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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Having driven a couple of Fairmounts I would judge the Cougars, Thunderbirds, and Granadas as being the worst examples of the early 80s and that their aero 83s as being the breath of fresh air and salvation of Ford along with the Taurus and the Sable. The midsize GMs of 82 were a much better car than this guished up version of a Fairmont. This was the worst of Ford and is best to be forgotten and left to the junkyard.
identical to the one we had, but ours came with cruise control.