Any reason to not look at ‘99-‘02 Cougars as an appliance?

Same as a Contour I assume? Of course with a “Manuel” transmission.

If looking at these 2 dr hatches, I would highly recommend looking at a Scion tC.  The Scion in manual trans form seems to be hard to sell since it is not all that sporty, not all that high mpg, but is super reliable with 2.4L Camry running gear.  

The Cougar hatch too should be a completely forgotten model.  I bet they are hard to sell so that should translate to super cheap prices.

In reply to John Welsh :

They definitely are cheap near me. I have in fact been checking out the tC. I’m sure I started a thread about it here. I remember being told it was pretty heavy (perhaps porky was the term used). Both seem to be well received by the press.

It's also the continuation of the Probe.  Nothing wrong with it, as far as I've heard.  

It's too bad that the Cougar S never happened- which is a Cougar that has Contour SVT parts under it.  But by then, the 2 door coupe was almost dead, so it never happened.

Calling the elderly an appliance seems wrong to me somehow. 

Oh. Wait. Wrong cougar. 

I got nothing exceptthat the tC from that era didn't suck to drive with a stick. The cougar sucked to drive AND maintain. 

They were cool cars, that I think would have benefited from a different badge on the back.  It certainly should have been a Ford not a Mercury and would have benefited from a different name too.

I love the Contour platform.  I had an SVT Contour for about 3 years as my daily and it's a really really good handling car with reasonable NVH, quality, space and ergonomics for the time.  There's a lot of total BS on line about how hard it is too work on them.  BS.  

A great junk yard build would be to drop a 3.0L in from a Taurus or Escape.  A Torsen diff (used to be) cheap at around $600 as it was also used in an OEM application, I think it was the Euro Focus RS, but I don't know if they are still that cheap.  You can still get SVT Contour spring and struts/shocks new for dirt cheap and that makes for an excellent sporty but DD friendly set up.  I really can't say enough good stuff about this platform.  In fat my SVTC is only the second car I've regretted selling in my life.

Wow, cheap...

'01 w/ 127k needs clutch asking $300  4cyl

'00 w/80k miles asking $1,500  V6

I can't think of a more forgotten car than these

In reply to John Welsh :

Can you post what was being asked for those?

I’m a hopeless Tiburon fan and get a little bit of that when I see them.

the newest one is 17 years old.   not sure if i'd look to a 17-year-old car if i was looking for an appliance.

i think it's more contour than probe under the skin.   Duratec engine, Ford transaxle.   

I remember when those were new.. and how Ford seemed to have completely dropped the ball by not also bringing over the Puma to take over the escort's role. I also seem to remember it did not take long for them to get abused and killed. They showed up with barely a whimper in the news and just vanished without a sigh.

There was something about that whole era of Ford FWD cars. The Contour, Cougar, Tempo. Poorly put together and with no legs to keep going. I see more probes on the road around here than I see Cougars, Tempos, or Contours. For that matter I see more Escorts than the Probes

In reply to mad_machine :

My guess is the automatic transmission cars died and there wasn’t a huge availability of manuals.

At least when Oldsmobile died you could look back at the Aurora as being the last gasp of 'indigenous', really differentiated Oldsmobile design.  When I look at a Cougar i see a Ford and I dont know how you were supposed to get compact sporty coupe buyers into a Mercury dealership in the first place. 

I've worked on a couple. They're unpleasant to work on in the same way the other small fords of the time were, but nothing out of the ordinary. I think all the various cars that had 2.5L versions of 3.0L v6s in them all had the same problem of having all the space constraints under the hood and none of the performance that would come if it was actually the 3 liter. 

But there's your low hanging fruit. 3.0 swap suddenly justifies its existence. But, there's a really good chance i'd still rather have a 2.5L Probe than a 3.0-swapped Cougar. Either way, it depends more on what you can find then what pie in the sky thing you'd prefer in the perfect world where you had both choices.

I live in the valley of unicorns, and I have seen one of these total in the last 6 months....

If "appliance" means what I think then I would head toward the 4cyl version of the Cougar.  Less grunt but probably a whole lot less "trouble."  What this should net you is pretty much a Escort ZX2/Focus with some artsy bodywork.  

If wiki is to be believed, most all 4cyl were manual trans.  Claims of only 500 units of 4cyl with auto trans.

Go try to buy a part for it, other than engine parts, and get back to me.

I understand that doing things this way can get tedious and space intensive, but according to that first ad you can get Cougar parts for about 10 cents a lb.