The Best Odds

The cars I recall most fondly were neither the prettiest nor the quickest. Certainly not the most expensive. They were machines that emerged willfully peculiar and intractably idiosyncratic.

- John Phillips

TO OUR CHAOTIC SHORES the Big Three have randomly imported Eurospec cars. Apart from tear gas, little has more reliably induced regret and schadenfreude. Examples abound: (1) an Opel Astra sold here as a Saturn Astra, (2) an Opel Omega as a Cadillac Catera, (3) a Teutonic Ford Sierra as a 1985 Merkur XR4Ti.

Importing the Ford required more balls than are weekly bounced by the Harlem Globetrotters. For starters, no one could pronounce Merkur, including salespeople at about 700 "select" Lincoln-Mercury dealers, many of whom selected to be deselected. Asserted Dearborn: "Merkur is a Greek god; it's 'Mercury' in German; it's a planet; it's the element known as quicksilver." I'm not sure that sales folks right then really needed quicksilver.