Nowadays, people don’t blink twice at weird model names. There are plenty of offenders, but BMW’s naming scheme is probably among the worst, which is how you end up with the BMW X5 Xdrive40d. Would it have been so horrible to call it the X535is? It’s enough to make you pine for the days when CR-X HF or XR4Ti was considered awkward, never mind the simplicity in names like Sentra XE. Nonetheless, for a make and model that were new to the American market, the marketing machine that was and is Ford could have definitely done something a little more evocative than a jumble of numbers and letters, which did their best to disguise the virtues of a turbo all-wheel drive coupe. Wait, you say it’s not all-wheel drive? But XR4… it has “X” and “4” in the model designation? Which, as it turns out, just designates it as the bigger brother of XR2 and XR3 (Fiesta and Escort, respectively). Let’s take a look at this 1987 Merkur XR4Ti for sale for $1500 in Grandview, WA.
Rusty But Trusty 