Mercury · introduced 1960
Among the 48 Mercury entries in the MotorJury library, the Mercury Comet holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1960. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Mercury Comet properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Volvo Cars Volvo P1800, the Jaguar Cars Jaguar E-Type, the Dodge Dodge Challenger — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Mercury Comet reads like this: the record lists its engine as 144 cuin Ford straight-six engine#144 / Thriftpower Straight-six engine / I6 / 170 cuin Ford straight-six engine#170 / Thriftpower I6 / 260 cuin Ford small block engine#260 / Chall; drive goes through 3-speed manual / 2-speed automatic / 4-speed manual; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Mercury's own catalogue the Mercury Comet sits alongside the Mercury Bobcat (1975), the Mercury Capri (1970), the Mercury Cougar (1967), the Mercury Cyclone (1964). It was succeeded by the Mercury Zephyr / Mercury Monarch. Assembly is recorded at Oakville, Ontario, Canada / Claycomo, Missouri, United States / Lorain, Ohio, United States / Milpitas, California, United States / Wayne, Michigan, United States.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Mercury Comet was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.