Heavyweight for a Requiem

SOME people whine about the Automats’ closing over lunch at the Russian Tea Room. Others buy cheap lumber at Home Depot but get misty-eyed about how there are no more locally owned hardware stores. Who really ever shopped at Woolworth’s? But plenty of us say we miss it.

And a lot of us will pretend to miss the Mercury Grand Marquis when, any day now, the last new one is sold off some dealer’s lot.

The Grand Marquis is the last of its kind, a relic of a past not that long past. It’s the final full-size, full-frame, nonluxury American sedan with V-8 power, rear drive and a solid rear axle that is available for retail sale to the general public.

It’s the kind of car dad bought because his buddy at the Kiwanis Club owned the dealership and he didn’t want something flashy like a Lincoln. A car you could wear a hat in.

General Motors produced its last full-size, rear-drive, body-on-frame cars in 1996; Chrysler’s last sedan in this size class was the ’81 Newport. Since 2008, Ford has restricted sales of the rugged, industrial-grade Crown Victoria (identical to the Grand Marquis except for the trim) to taxi and police fleets. And the Lincoln Town Car — a close cousin and workhorse of the livery industry — aspires to a grandeur that’s beyond any Mercury. By the end of the 2011 model year, the Crown Vic and Town Car will be gone too.

Wallowing anachronism that it is, the Grand Ma has its charms. It has two bench seats big enough for six wide bottoms and a vast trunk that may well be able to hold enough tenor tubas for six pairs of lips. It rides as if the tires aren’t just smothering out the road’s divots, but giving each of them a somber, dignified burial.

For just over $30,000 the Grand Marquis buyer gets a car that’s 212 inches long and 78.3 inches wide; that’s nearly two feet longer and more than six inches wider than a Toyota Camry. It’s even 5.5 inches longer than the big Mercedes-Benz S550 that starts around $92,000.

But it’s not easy to get a new 2010 or 2011 Grand Marquis. Mercury dealers have been offering the car only by special order, and production for retail customers ceased in October. The few new Grand Marquis sedans that are left are anomalies: canceled orders or excess stock.

For the last two model years there was only one trim level, the LS, with a short list of options: chrome wheels, heated seats, adjustable pedals, a radio with a retro tape-cassette player, a leather-and-wood steering wheel and a “smoker’s package” (a lighter and an ashtray that fills up one of the cup holders). If you checked all the boxes the $30,685 base price would swell just to $32,295.

No, there wasn’t a “de Sade package.” (A worn-out joke? Yes — for old times’ sake.)

If you want a sunroof, bring a can opener. Bluetooth? MP3? GPS? Those are technologies from a whole other century than the one for which the Grand Marquis was designed.

Since Ford isn’t keeping any Grand Marquis in its fleet of test cars, I rented one from Hertz at the Los Angeles airport. Rental prices vary insanely, sometimes within the space of a few hours or over the term of a single loan. My rate ran just $38 a day after a midloan renegotiation dropped the price down from more than $100 a day. Go figure.

With its bolt-upright cabin and long par-5 decklid, the Grand Marquis’s basic styling looked old even when it was new way back in 1992. And much of the car’s engineering dates back to the 1970s, not to mention a basic chassis design from 1965. Much of the car feels old. Opening the doors reveals power locks that operate with crude suddenness and black plastic handles that feel cheap to the touch. The doors shut with a hollow, metallic thud, but seal tightly. After two decades of production, Ford knows how to assemble the Grand Marquis, but sophistication isn’t part of the deal.

Inside, the front and rear bench seats are covered in leather so plasticized that you don’t recognize it as leather. The front bench is split with foldable armrests at the center, but it lacks any discernibly supportive shape. You don’t so much sit in this seat as slide in atop it and hope the seat belts keep you from skidding around. It’s impossible to find a comfortable conventional seating position.

The back seat, on the other hand, is so squishy-soft that you almost feel you’re drowning in it. The space for legs is ample, but the Grand Marquis doesn’t have the sort of rear stretch-out room you expect from a car so vast.

From his or her perch, the driver faces a simple instrument panel with a conventional circular speedometer and tachometer. In addition, there’s a supplementary digital speedometer that’s amazingly accurate — Ford’s cop car heritage shining through. This is one of the few cars around that mounts the shifter for its automatic transmission on the steering column, and it actually works well. And the space it frees up between the front seats is significant.

There are seat-mounted side air bags for driver and front passenger, as well as the expected front bags. But curtain bags over the doors, to protect heads in a side impact, are not available.