Among affordable sports coupes of the 1970s available in North America, there can’t be many remaining with a better aftermarket than the Capri. Yes, you might have to brush up on your British English or German, but once you’ve got that down, you’ll be reaching two countries with big fan bases for these cars. And indeed, the Capri had (and still has) a cult fan base in North America. Check out this 1973 Mercury Capri for sale for $3500 in Sandy, OR.
So if you had a sports coupe with reasonably attractive, contemporary styling and a fun turbocharged drivetrain, you’d definitely want to name it after something unpleasant aliens to do people they’ve abducted, right? Meant to be a replacement for the successful Capri in Europe, as well as the less-successful EXP in North America, and possibly the Mustang, it’s maybe better seen as a replacement for (or contemporary of) the Merkur XR4Ti featured yesterday. Of course, the Probe, built on Mazda’s GD platform and shared with the MX-6 and 626, is a lower-powered, front-wheel-drive car without some of the European charm, but thanks to attrition it’s become a pretty unusual sight on the roads itself. Check out this 1989 Ford Probe GT for sale for $2000 in Puyallup, WA.
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 