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Good Or Bad? The Car And Track Tests Of The 1974 Olds Cutlass And Mercury Cougar!


Good Or Bad? The Car And Track Tests Of The 1974 Olds Cutlass And Mercury Cougar!

Throughout the 1970s, the Oldsmobile Cutlass ruled all. One of the best-selling cars of the decade, the Cutlass was the right mix of comfy, sporty, durable, and that final dash of what they were trying to pass off as “performance” and resonated with buyers in a way that might have only been rivaled by it’s corporate cousin, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Personal luxury coupes were reaching their stride and weren’t going away anytime soon. The 442 might have been a little toothless and those weird lower bodylines weren’t going to be cleaned up for another couple of years, but when you’re selling every one you make and the line for buyers isn’t shrinking, you don’t change the recipe at random.

Then there is the Mercury Cougar. Starting out as the slightly longer, slightly more plush and plenty capable twin to the Ford Mustang, the Cougar made a jump, arguably for the worse, to the Torino platform in 1974. If buyers were unhappy with big Mustangs, moving the Cougar over to the Torino line had to have been somewhere between blasphemy and blatant indifference to the buyer’s wishes. It’s easy to throw Lee Iacocca under the bus on this deal, but the 1974 Cougar does smack quite a bit of Lido’s known tastes. That doesn’t mean that the big Mercury…or the Cutlass, for that matter…are safe from Bud Lindemann’s scathing honesty in reviewing both of these cars.


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3 thoughts on “Good Or Bad? The Car And Track Tests Of The 1974 Olds Cutlass And Mercury Cougar!

  1. Danno

    It was during this decade that a good number of American car enthusiasts started looking outside the USA to Europe and Japan for cars. Watching the video totally explains why. It was the America car manufacturers own fault that the American car market is now flooded with European and Asian vehicles.

    1. tw

      Fact , there is no more American cars on the roads except for a few muscle cars , and of course full size Pick-ups and suv . But for how long ? Americans automakers are living on short sight ideology and are digging their own grave .

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